


Neptune Rising

by chess_boxing



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Blasphemy, Bloodletting, Body Horror, Christianity, Fluff, Homophobia, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, Religion, Religious Guilt, Self-Harm, Sexuality Crisis, Summer Camp, Witchcraft, can also safely tag this with
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2018-10-16 14:30:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 24,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10573215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chess_boxing/pseuds/chess_boxing
Summary: They’re calling it the end of days.Teenagers selected for a week of tuition at Camp Wormwood are trained to protect their hometowns against the worsening rise in demonic attacks. On the final night, pairs of students are each sent to an isolated cabin in the forest for a final trial where, after sunset, the Devil will come for them.Tyler and Josh must resist him until the sun rises.(hi! just a note that i finished uni, so this story is back from the grave! it has one or two chapters left in it, nearly done. millions of thanks to anyone who's reading or left comments while i was away. it makes me endlessly happy that yall are into this witchy joshler trash xx)





	1. Prologue (A Tuesday)

When Tyler’s twelve, he dreams of a great green lion prowling through a field, each of its paws the size of cars. Strings of sunlight drool from its sticky jaws and soak the grass. Tyler kneels beside a bright puddle of it, wets his hands, and smears them up against the blue of the sky. His fingertips sweep and smudge, and when he wakes up, the column of symbols that he drew are painted onto the backs of his eyelids in technicolour, as though he really had just been staring down sunlight.

Flinging a hand out to the bedside table, Tyler flicks on the lamp and scrambles for a pen. On the nearest surface available – the back of his forearm, with his elbow stuck out and his wrist at his neck – he copies the shapes from memory, tongue between his teeth.

A few days later – before they fade – he copies them out again, layering ink over grayed-out ink. He doesn’t know why. They just feel important. In time, his mom notices and tells him to stop, so he sketches them out on a sheet of paper and tapes it to his bedframe – but the next week, going through a particularly slow math workbook, he finds himself idly doodling them onto his arm again. When his mom throws his felt tips out, he just works a ballpoint back and forth until the lines are thick enough.

When he’s sixteen, they let him get his first tattoo.

Tyler’s fingertips blindly play up and down the nonsense-familiar lines of it as he reads through the acceptance letter on the kitchen table again, his heart beating faster in his chest. He has three weeks to pack a suitcase and write his will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally want to start posting some of this online! I started writing it after playing a tiny indie game last summer called We Know The Devil (it’s on Steam, rly cheap I think). It was really barely developed and had very little actual gameplay, but it was so thematically strong that I wanted the universe to be fleshed out properly and sorta just rolled with it. it doesn’t resemble the game much anymore but wanted to mention anyway! tags will add as i go because hhh it's late, i'm out. goodnight!! x


	2. Monday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the prologue was too short to count as anything lmao have an actual chapter

Amidst the crunch of tires on gravel outside, the dull clatter of suitcase wheels on floorboards, and the conversations thrown between walls, Tyler kneels beside his bunk bed and presses his fingertips into the surface of his wooden prayer box.

The catch clicks quietly, the silver hinges silent as the lid lifts. Most of the items inside are wrapped in white cloth, but the herbs lie at the top, their stems bound with twine: morning glory; rosemary; white sage. Some of the other kids have already tied their herbs to the bedposts, or hung them from the wooden slats of the top bunks. Tyler worries at the twine with the tip of his thumb, considering, and eventually slips the morning glory blossoms beneath his pillow, the dry petals scratching a little at the cotton as he pushes them into place. They might trade his nightmares for peace; he wants them as close to his closed eyes as possible.

Leaving everything else – his crystals, the tarot cards – in the box, Tyler finishes decorating the bedframe with his crucifix and the flight feather of a magpie. It’s always weird away from home, where the warding on his own bed is so heavy and familiar that it may as well be a second blanket. And the candle – he’s not sure if he’s allowed candles in the dormitory hut. Half-unrolling it from its cloth, he drags a slim fingertip along a couple of the grooves. A couple of nights ago, he carved the sigil himself, hunched-over and cross-legged on the back porch. It’s for strength of faith. Tyler glances around the room again for guidance. It’s buzzing with movement, all of it at once, voices and faces, and _all_ of them have names. He wishes he’d gone to _real_ school, like a _real_ kid.

“Hey, this is bunk eighteen, right? Yeah. Cool.”

Tyler’s fingers stutter on the smooth white wax as he twists around. Whoever spoke has already stepped around him, so he twists again; a duffel bag drops to the floorboards less than a foot in front of him and the sound sends an embarrassing twitch down his spine.

“Oh – sorry,” the other kid says, dropping to his knees, and Tyler finds himself _openly staring._ He’s only seen blue hair once before, when he was very young – and that had been on TV, when the local news had broadcast a witch burning, and his mom hadn’t caught the remote fast enough to switch the channel. And – Tyler’s seen stretched ears before, but never up close. He can see right through the tunnels, _right_ to the skin behind the boy’s ear. There’s a little black shape tattooed there.

He can’t stop staring, even when he’s been caught, and they hold a long, maybe-strange moment of eye contact before Tyler spits out something; anything. All in one go, bursting up, like a cough.

“Hey, I’m Tyler, I really like your hair.”

“Thanks Tyler, I’m Josh,” Josh fires back, and he smiles like the sun coming out, teeth neat and feline-sharp, and Tyler’s still kinda staring. “Am I top bunk?”

“All yours,” he answers, and drags his attention back to his own bag, though he’s not really concentrating. He’s heard that they pair bunkmates up for the final trial – life or death, Sunday night. He just met the guy whose life is probably in his hands. They’ve gotta spend the whole camp attached at the hip, working close, practising how to protect one another, and Josh – _Josh, okay, his name’s Josh_ – is kneeling at his side, digging out his own prayer box. He needs to see inside. He wants to know what he’s working with.

The lid’s imperfectly aligned, the way only hand-cut boxes ever are. From the skimmed look that Tyler gets at Josh’s crystal collection, he can assume that his soul is governed by the sun, but aligned with the element of water. That’s cool; it contrasts with Tyler’s own ruling by Neptune and the air element. They’re going to be air and water – the clouds, sea-mist, heavy rainfall on humid evenings. Even though it’s summer, Josh wears charcoal-grey fingerless gloves, stray threads shivering as his hands deftly pick through the box’s contents. Chamomile and eucalyptus; a sea shell; the startlingly fragile skull of a bat; a small bag of polished river stones – rune-carved, for casting fortunes – and then, to his shame, Tyler doesn’t realise that he’s being watched until Josh’s fingers have long stopped moving.

A solid, wet lump of humiliation and guilt settles way down in his stomach and Tyler looks away with a quick apology, but Josh seems the actual opposite of offended.

“His name’s Spooky,” he says, placing the little ivory-pale, bleach-smoothed skull in the gloved palm of his hand. Spooky’s lower jaw is carefully wired into place, so delicate that Tyler glances over Josh’s blunt fingertips and wonders _how._ “I found him on a hike in Canada.”

“Awesome,” Tyler says, and he really does mean it. He’s never found anything out on the trails near his home, but everyone else in his family has something to guard the lids of their prayer boxes at night – a rabbit; an owl; a roe deer with young antlers. His brother found a crocodile skull in Florida just earlier this year. It’s not that Tyler doesn’t look; it’s just that he’s not very lucky. “Bats are some of my favourites. Bats and birds.”

“Oh, man, same. I’m all about cats though. My sister has an actual bobcat skull and I’m _super_ jealous. She loves him though. Even taking him to camp.”

“What, like a church camp?”

“This one, yeah. Wormwood. The week after us, though.”

Tyler suddenly feels very awkward, his brain supplying a dozen responses, and none tactful. “Cool, I know a girl at school who’s working a camp this year, too, now that we’ve all graduated. In catering, I think.”

“No, like - she’s younger than us, I just couldn’t book us slots in the same week. But she’s coming anyway.”

“Like -?”

“Yeah, for the training.”

 “It’s not allowed,” Tyler says, too surprised for manners.

Josh laughs, lowering his gaze, and continues to set up his prayer box. Tyler’s attention flicks back to the gloves again – it’s almost too hot for t-shirts, and the fabric clings to the shapes of his hands and his wrists as they move. “It’s actually not _illegal_ in this state. Yet. She’s really ambitious, and our town really needs the numbers right now. She wants to save lives.”

“Wow.” Tyler raises his eyebrows. He thinks about passing the charred witch-pyres on his walk to the bus stop at the end of his street. He remembers eating cereal straight from the box, watching CNN showing shaky, cell phone footage of the protective warding spells failing on a one-traffic-light town in Oklahoma. He can hear his pastor delivering Sunday morning sermons, spittle catching in the mic as he lists those unfit to carry out holy duty: _the women, the blacks, the fags._ “That’s actually really cool.”

“She is,” Josh smiles a little, slipping a small chunk of amber between his bat’s tiny jaws and setting it on the top of his box, lid sealed. “I worry that they’ll give her a rough time, but she can handle it. She can handle anyone. Sometimes I feel like _she’s_ the one trying to raise _me_.”

|-/

Camp Wormwood is, broadly speaking, composed of three clearings in a lakeside forest, the first being the wide, circular conclusion of the dirt-and-gravel drive that the cars and buses had arrived by. It’s surrounded by the staff offices, the canteen, the dormitory huts and the washrooms, and Tyler thinks that it’s deeply ugly in a classically utilitarian, cinder-block, _soulless_ sort of manner. The next clearing along hosts the wooden chapel and seminar rooms, and it’s so dusty that every time someone walks across it, their footsteps refresh the dry, sandy haze that permanently hangs above the ground. He doesn’t mind; it’s a space cleansed for prayer and ritual, and as wisps of dust tangle up with smoky threads of burning incense along the circle’s border, Tyler finds that marriage – between earth and fire – quietly inspiring.

Just beyond a bright, grassy ridge lies a long, sweeping slope of young trees, which runs to the shore of Wormwood lake itself. On the beach, counsellors and campmates are sitting cross-legged around the outside of a drawn circle, chatter drifting in the air. There’s a little campfire in the centre. It’s the kind of dusk where the clouds stand out indigo on watercolour-blue sky, like a photograph negative, and the candles that mark out the round space throw out flashes of yellow in the breeze. Josh and Tyler kneel, side-by-side, close to the east-most candle. He notices that Josh is wearing socks patterned with little alien faces, Roswell style, bright green against the black.

“I like your socks,” he says.

The fire lights up Josh’s grin and he claps his feet together, ankles knocking. High, happy laughter bursts sharply from Tyler’s lips.

“I like your tattoo,” Josh says back, and Tyler lifts his elbow to stare at the back of his arm, the same way he does when _anyone_ points it out, like he’s never seen it before. “What does it mean?”

He runs one finger down the column, lazy-tracing the ink. “This is gonna sound dumb but I really don’t know,” he answers. “It’s just me.”

It’s not as crowded as he’d expected – in the canteen, the walls had rung with shouts and the clattering of plates, and Tyler had guessed over a hundred people were packed around the plastic tables. He’d kept his head low, narrowing his world down to his mac-and-cheese dinner, and he and Josh had bonded over mutual anxiety. Now, with the wide, wide sky thinly veiling stars above, the chatter’s much easier to stomach. The actual numbers are closer to fifty, maybe. Twenty-five pairs.

The little campfire in the very centre of the circle struggles upright against a gust of wind.

“Hi everyone, my name’s Counsellor King and it’s a pleasure to welcome you to Camp Wormwood,”, a counsellor begins, quelling the mingled conversations. “You all know why your parents have enrolled you onto this program. Demonic possessions are up by a third in this state alone, and we aren't even the worst hit.”

Tyler knows. In spring – the same time his brother found that dead crocodile – he took a road trip with his family, and on the way through West Virginia, he remembers a stretch of the interstate where the miles were marked by crucified pastors, their collared necks slumped and blood-choked in the sun. Two weeks ago, his Twitter feed was scattered with panicked footage of a church which had been locked from the inside and set ablaze just two towns over. He vividly remembers the screams of the trapped congregation, punctuated by the bursting of stained glass.

Tyler tears his eyes from the flames of the candle closest to him and notices that the entire camp is eerily silent, Counsellor King pausing to quite deliberately stir those exact sounds and images in the minds of the kids to his left and right, too. Tyler watches King closely. The man’s in his sixties, maybe, and slim in a stringy, fibrous sort of way, like he’s built of tangled rubber bands. He dresses midway between drill sergeant and history teacher. He’s got a neatly-stubbled jaw, and bright eyes that dart and flash like the minnows in Tyler’s brother’s fish tank back home. King continues.

“The Devil is on the rise, but we know the Devil and, mark my words, we will bring him to his knees. This week, you will become proficient not only at the recognition and the comprehension of protective sigil components, but at their drawing and activation. We’ll also be conducting good old fashioned Bible study, as well as a session in the interpretation and manifestation of prophecy, and you will certainly leave here with the skills necessary to provide rudimentary demonic warding to not only yourselves, but to the outskirts of a village, or small town.”

The circle’s quiet enough to hear the shifting of ash amongst the crackling firewood. There won’t be a single person around the circle who hasn’t lost someone to one infernal uprising or another. Everyone’s got revenge to exact in the names of those who have fallen; everyone’s got promises to keep to those who haven’t. Tyler swallows and feels his heartrate pick up.

“As I’m sure you’re aware, a number of the most effective warding rituals require two or more participants, so you’ve been assigned partners for the duration of your training. No matter which block you’re sleeping in, your partners are those with whom you share a bunk. You should all take note – if you haven’t already, that is.”

A hushed but steady stream of chatter rises up amongst the soft snapping sounds of the fire. Tyler glances over to see Josh already side-eyeing him; the other boy flashes him a quick, proudly dorky grin. A little answering smile tugs at the corners of his lips before he has time to look away again.

King speaks brusquely, but at length, about the techniques which the seminars and classes will cover. There’ll be three meals a day, morning prayer, and evening prayer. Classes are mostly to be held in the seminar huts, though a couple of spells and rituals must, by nature, be taught and practiced outside. Under no circumstances is anyone to leave the camp’s boundaries – they, themselves, are lined with protective warding markings which guard the space within, preventing evil presences or demons from crossing their borders.

The five other counsellors are introduced by name. Alongside King, Tyler reckons that, like, three of them could plausibly have been members of the same police line-up. One is a priest specifically present to offer spiritual guidance, especially on the final day – just before the trial.

“You each have an appointment set with Pastor Thorne on Sunday afternoon, where you’ll discuss your faith and progress over the last week, and you’ll Confess in preparation for the final test at sundown.”

A stinging sensation bursts in the inside of his cheek from where Tyler’s biting it. He can see a column of tattooed sigils on Thorne’s forearm, a little like his own, but not the same. The black ink swallows the firelight right up.

“At sundown, you and your partner will be handed a map to a cabin outside of the camp’s protective perimeter, where you will rely on everything you have learned this week. You must remain there until you are collected at sunrise on Monday morning. The Devil himself will follow you there, and first he will try to get inside of the cabin, and then he will try to get inside of your hearts. You must keep him out.”

Tyler knows what happens to those who fail the task, and by the expressions of those around him, he suspects that they’ve all heard, too. Even if it wasn’t common knowledge, he saw the pyres amongst the trees through the bus window. They arched and bent artificially amongst the clean, vertical lines of the tree trunks, a series of crooked, dark structures, still smouldering from the morning’s executions despite their empty posts. King finishes up his address quickly. It’s hard to follow up on a subject so devastatingly sobering.

“Just a couple of other notes – lights go out at eleven, and that means no candles, incense, etcetera. We’ll be around to check that everything’s extinguished. And – Joshua Dun, is that right?” he adds, abruptly, almost as though interrupting himself. Tyler’s eyes flick over - he’s not sure if there are multiple Joshes at this camp – but sure enough, the kid in the counsellor’s sights is the one that he can only refer to as _his_ Josh. Josh’s eyes widen and he nods quickly, little more than a vertical twitch. “Son, would you mind staying back, so we can speak to you, please? That’d be just great. Night, now, the rest of you.”

|-/

Josh returns a little over an hour later, the dormitory already dark and silent. It’s only because Tyler’s awkwardly lying awake and waiting that he catches the footsteps cautiously treading towards his bunk.

“Hey,” he hisses, soft as the breeze outside against the trees.

“Hey yourself,” Josh murmurs back, dropping to his knees beside the bed and quietly dragging out his duffel bag from beneath the lower mattress. Tyler rolls over to watch. He wouldn’t usually – _weird, loser, creep_ – but the blackness of the dormitories cloaks the moment; makes it okay. As Josh pulls his shirt over his head and drops it into his bag, the weak moonlight coming through dusty windowpanes just illuminates the slopes and planes of his skin well enough for Tyler to notice that he’s dripping water.

“You’re wet,” he says, dumbly.

“Yeah.”

Something’s off. This isn’t the scrunched-eyes, wide-grin kid who had introduced himself earlier.

“Are you okay?” Tyler asks instead. He pushes himself up on one elbow, tugging his phone from its charger to see by the screen light.

As soon as he does, it’s all self-explanatory. Josh kneels, illuminated, on the rough floorboards, his pale chest striped with water droplets. His hair is a soaked, scrubbed-clean tangle. The vibrant shock of blue is a pale, greenish ghost of its former self, worked so violently that Josh’s scalp – and some of his forehead – is still visibly red-raw, and close to bleeding. Tyler wonders if they used bleach.

“It’s for humility,” Josh says. He sounds tired, but Tyler catches a bitter taste to the edge of the syllables. He gets the impression of somebody repeating something that they’ve been told on more than a few occasions. “They say it’ll make the trial easier. Good news for you, I guess.”

“I liked it,” he murmurs, not really sure what to say. “Is your skin okay? We could go to the medical office in the morning, maybe they’ve got, like, lotion or something.”

“It’s cool. It looks worse than it is,” Josh shrugs, and squirms his hips free of his shorts, packing them away too. He finishes by opening his prayer box and fishing out a fresh, green sprig of cypress leaves, which he tosses up onto his bed – for healing, comfort, protection. He’s still wearing his fingerless gloves when he starts climbing the ladder.

“For what it’s worth,” Tyler hurriedly says – before Josh and the moment disappear – “you rock the green.”

Josh’s face splits into a delighted grin, his eyes crinkling right up, and once again he’s the kid Tyler met five hours ago.

“Thanks, man,” he says, swinging up the ladder and into his own bed. Tyler listens to the frame and the mattress springs creak as Josh gets comfortable.

“Goodnight.”

“Night.”


	3. Monday Night

_On the first night, Tyler dreams of the soft bite of fresh, loose soil breaking between his toes. He’s walking along a shallow but wide furrow in the earth, as though celestial fingertips had once traced its path as gently as they knew how. On either side, a line of hundreds of dead white saplings stand sentinel to his every footstep, like antlers stolen from the skulls of stags and planted in the dirt. Regarding them with increasing curiosity, Tyler allows his footprints to veer, and strokes the pad of his thumb along a twig. It bursts. He leaps back hastily as green launches from the shattered barrel of the wood like parade streamers. Branches and bright leaves burst skywards, and the fertile ground beneath him trembles as thick, strong roots plunge their fingers deep. Before Tyler’s next breath, an outstretched canopy filters the previously scorching sunlight, letting it play in dappled blotches across his skin. He’s awestruck, agape, tilting his head back to watch the leaves shimmer and buzz with life. Birds flit from branch to branch; vines blossom as they ensnare the trunk, scattering it with colour. When Tyler’s neck aches too much to keep watching, he walks to the next and - stomach dancing with apprehension - gives it a gentle prod. It follows suit, and now there are twin trees reaching for the clouds._

_He flicks the third with more confidence; he high-fives the fourth; he sprints with one arm outstretched along five-six-seven-eight, like a kid running a stick along railings. He doesn’t stop until the forest is vast and magnificent, tight-knit, and the air sings with movement._

_Tyler realises, all of a sudden, that he is surrounded and can no longer see the path upon which he is sure he is supposed to walk. A drop of anxiety colours the whole miracle and turns it bad, like blood in a glass of water. As he’s about to set off towards the sun, a desperate fluttering of movement amongst the nearby leaves seizes his attention. It’s a honeybee trapped in a spiderweb. He watches uneasily as it gradually stills, leaking honey in shivering strings from the web. It puddles stickily on the forest floor. As Tyler walks away, he tries his hardest to unsee it._


	4. Tuesday

The unease of Tyler’s dream permeates the following morning, colouring it an overbearing yellow that matches the chamomile tied to Josh’s bedpost and the buttered toast in the canteen.

Josh seems slightly quiet, but mostly unfazed by the incident the night before. Tyler finds him strikingly easy company. He’s like bottled sunlight, but not the kind that you’ve got to shield your eyes from. There’s a deadpan-surrealist, quietly neurotic streak which softens all those bright, hard edges. They sit elbow to elbow – at the breakfast table, at 7AM prayer by the glassy, mist-shrouded lake, and at the morning seminar on sigil recognition. Though it’s a relief, it’s almost immaterial that Tyler likes Josh and that Josh _kinda, maybe, apparently_ likes Tyler back. The confirmation that they’ll be paired for the cabin trial represents not just an expectation, but a life-or-death _need_ for them to become as quickly and closely acquainted as possible within a week. Tyler needs an impression of every inch of Josh’s soul - he needs it mapped out, pressed into his own until they function and fight as one.

It’s first mentioned on the way between the dorm huts and the cabin where they have their first formal class. Josh has just showered, and he keeps brushing water droplets from his cheek, where it’s dripping from the tips of his faded-mint hair. It still looks kinda cool. Tyler’s surprised, actually, that they didn’t just shave it all right off.

“Are you scared?”

“Ye-e-ah,” Tyler drags out the word so that it sounds sheepish, kicking at the dust in the clearing and watching it rise up and recoil, spectral. “My dad’s been teaching me how to ward smaller places like my bedroom since I was about ten, but – this is – it’s different. This is big.”

“Same. They taught us some stuff at Sunday school, you know? Mom used to help out there so I learned really early too. We did basic warding. Usually to keep church safe during services.”

That’s cool; Tyler’s glad that Josh knows what he’s doing. He almost feels mean for thinking it – he winces at the idea of impatience at a partner who hadn’t had the same lucky headstart – but it really does put them on even ground from the beginning. Neither’s ahead or behind, teacher or student; they’re a team.

“We don’t need to be afraid,” Josh continues, his voice lowering as they approach the group idling at the hut’s entrance. “It’s all down to our faith. Long as that’s strong, the Devil can’t touch us.”

“You’re, uh… you’re not scared?”

“Oh, I’m, like, fucking terrified,” he barely breathes, the curse almost incomprehensible, and ridiculous, high giggles burst from Tyler as he follows Josh into the classroom.

Aside from the desks and the whiteboard propped against the front wall, it reminds him of a hunter’s lodge more than any kind of school. Skulls line the walls. Sea shells and handcrafted charms are strung up between the paired tips of deer antlers. From the ceiling, drying bunches of herbs hang in uniform rows, giving the impression of some kind of dead, upside-down farm. They take seats beside one another and, upon instruction, each take out a pen, a notepad, and their grimoire.

It’s the most important book in their lives besides the Bible and, in Tyler’s case, it was gifted to him on the day of his baptism. It holds the scribbled history and spiritual significance of every power he has ever invoked. The front cover is bound with creased, faded leather and inlaid with a wooden pentagram, the glossy varnish of which has long since rubbed away along the centres of the symbol’s lines. The first few pages contain prayers in his neatest-ever-seven-year-old handwriting. After that, notes on his favourite herbs and crystals – usually, the ones used to help him sleep at night when he was very small, or the ones his mom would tuck into his pocket when he left the house. The most recent pages detail ever-more advanced rituals, the steps illustrated with complex sigils. He’s devoted the back page to drawings – tiny symbols sketched out in ink, their shapes overlapping, meanings multiplying.

Counsellor King begins the lesson by sketching on the whiteboard, its surface greying and scratched from years bearing this same lesson. It’s kinda basic, but Tyler drinks it all in, chewing on his lip as he scribbles. The gap between each desk makes it impossible to snatch proper glances of Josh’s own book, but Tyler’s eyes periodically drift over anyway, even as King speaks. The paper in it is clearly old – like, _old,_ a family heirloom, maybe – and Josh handles each page with impeccable care, the tips of finger-and-thumb barely catching the corners as he turns to the next.

After three hours of dissecting dozens upon dozens of sigils, the side of Tyler’s palm is inkstained and the room’s shoulders slope. Josh has a black smear across one cheekbone. A map is dropped to each of their tables. Proper, _thick_ maps, folded into thirty-twoths or sixty-fourths or whatever – the kind Tyler remembers his dad almost killing them trying to read on road trips – which lay out Camp Wormwood and the wide, wild forests and farmland across which it sprawls. Lake Wormwood cuts a graceful sickle across grid square 7H.

“If you’re not sitting beside your designated partners, please switch seats now, so that you’re together.”

A few chairs scrape, the cheap, hollow metal legs shuddering against the wooden floors. When their eyes catch, Tyler licks his thumb and mimes wiping Josh’s inkstain from his own cheek; imitating the movement, Josh’s nose wrinkles up with a grateful smile.

“There are ten pairs of you in this room, and ten warding stations marked on the map – like this, with a black triangle.”

Tyler peers in vain until Josh sticks a hand out across the gap and points one out. It’s a tiny little shape, but once he sees it, they start popping up everywhere. They form the ten corners of a pentagram – five for the points of the star, and five for the smaller pentagon at its centre.

“These are the sites where we’ve painted the same protective symbols, which, I think, we all know back to front after this morning. They’re how we keep the entire camp warded. You guys are going to go out to one each, stretch your legs, and make sure the markings aren’t damaged or fading. Paint pots are at the front in case they are. Let’s move out, people.”

|-/

Kids louder and more socially assertive than either of them _combined_ snatch up the innermost five points before Tyler’s even figured out how to fold his map back up, so they get landed with the northernmost star-point, a good three miles round trip. _And a half_ , if you count the detour they have to make around the lake. Beyond that, the hills rise up and obscure a patchwork sea of crop fields, horizon-wide if not for scatterings of sparse forests. It’s damn hot. No clouds. The dirt track bakes beneath their sneakers; two hours of treading cracked earth and stray dried grasses, their blades grazing Tyler’s bare ankles. With each step, the paint pots clatter in his backpack, just beneath the sound of their conversation.

He’s noticed that Josh wears a stone around his neck on a woven black thread. _Green calcite: for the calming of anxiety, the banishing of insecurities, and the dissolution of old, rigid beliefs._ It weighs gently upon the very centre of his chest, a slim, irregular column – acid-dipped, so that it holds a smooth, wet gleam even when dry. Tyler only meant to glance with the corner of his eye, but it blinks back soft little shards of sunlight so enchantingly that he doesn’t stop before Josh notices, his head flicking across with surprise, and Tyler drops his eyes hastily. _Loser. Loser. Creep. Loser._

But it’s okay. It’s cool. “I got it for my sixteenth,” Josh beams, scooping the little crystal up with his fingers and offering it out as far as the string will allow, for Tyler to tentatively admire up close. _It suits him_ , Tyler thinks. In fact, the warmth in Josh’s face is so similarly sunlit and inviting that he even dares to stroke the pad of his thumb along the shard’s edge. It’s much smoother than it looks. “Are you wearing yours?”

“I can’t,” Tyler answers, letting the pendant fall so that he can hoist his backpack a little higher by the straps. Sweat slips in the small of his back; to the west, the crops blur and shimmer towards the distant edge of the field, heat-warped. “Mine’s too fragile? It’s celestite.” _For defence against despair, for clarity in the realm of dreams, and for protection by the angels._ “I keep it in my prayer box.”

“Awesome.”

“It’s not _that_ awesome,” Tyler says back, and then feels guilt flare up, like he’s swatted away something precious and kind. “I mean, I love that it’s my soul stone, it’s – just – _everyone’s_ celestite, dude. Or they wanna be.”

“Hipster.”

Tyler giggles and sways to the side of the path, as though the jibe carried physical weight, his ankles swinging to playfully cross over one another for a few paces. “Okay. Maybe. True. But seriously, green calcite is a really cool one.”

The path takes a slight right and a sharp incline. Up ahead, the ridge of trees that marks the camp’s northern boundary looms closer, and they climb swiftly in seek of its shade.

“I guess I think so too,” Josh admits, pushing his faded hair back from his forehead. The way the blue’s been scrubbed out, it’s pretty much the same colour as the crystal around his neck. “Hey. I think _that_ could be the warding station. Up there.”

He’s got one hand shielding narrowed eyes, one finger outstretched, and Tyler follows it toward a dark shape amongst the cluster of trees. It looks like a structure of some kind, a few meters off the ground – like a treehouse, except definitely not a treehouse.

“Yeah, maybe?”

“I dunno what they look like here.”

“Same.”

As they get closer, it begins to shimmer in places where sunlight filters through the canopy above, like a big, flat screen. Like a mirror.

“It’s, like,” Josh pauses to hop over a fallen log, “it’s just sheet metal.”

He’s right. It’s bolted to a pair of trees, heavy-duty screws splintering their trunks right through. “There’s a ladder,” Tyler points, jumping from the log and landing on both feet, the impact jarring up his legs and rattling the paint cans. “Built into the tree, the left one. Yeah, right there.”

Josh’s palm runs along the bark as he rounds the first of the skewered trees, his fingers bumping along the rough splits and knots in its surface, neck tilted way back to take in the strange, apocalyptic-billboard sight of it. Back home, Tyler’s used to seeing the town warding painted on sheets of corrugated iron. The designs ripple and warp across the bumps and dips unless you look at them straight, dead-on.

“Wanna get your notepad out to check the design?” he asks.

“I think I’m good,” Josh answers. “You?”

Tyler just laughs – a sharp, delighted sound, because it hits him that they’re on the exact same page, and that it’s becoming a theme between them – and shrugs off his backpack, planting a foot on the first rung of the ladder. He knows his damn sigils, and they just spent _three hours_ refreshing his confidence. They don’t need _notepads._

“Could probably do with touching up a couple of the arrowheads,” Josh calls up as Tyler climbs.

“I got it,” he answers, throwing a look down.

Josh is just grinning.

To make it easier to reach the whole sigil, a heavy beam is suspended by the lower edge of the metal sheet, similarly screwed into the trees at either end – but Tyler’s super steady on his feet, a slim, cautious, slightly crouched shape amongst the trees, and he clambers up, easy. The only time he falters is when Josh tosses up a paint can, and that’s only because after he catches it in a cradle of both hands against his stomach, he sticks out a palm to brace his weight against the metal. He snatches it back immediately, crying out sharply.

“Are you okay?!”

“Y-yeah, I’m okay,” he answers back, laughing shakily. “It’s, like, _burning_ hot, dude.”

“The metal?”

“Yeah.” Like it’s been out under the summer sky for hours, except the sunlight’s dappled here at best. “Jeez.”

He ends up having to snap off a nearby twig to jack the lid open, but then he’s dipping two fingers into black paint, smooth and cool like glossy tar. Even through the liquid, the searing metal stings his fingertips as he begins to paint. Most of the sigil is contained within a big circle, and the four arrows reaching diagonally from its centre to its edges have started to fade grey in places. Tyler’s arm starts to ache from the weird angle as he finishes the second one. It’s then that he hears Josh say something.

“What’d you say?” he calls down, twisting as much as he can.

But Josh isn’t looking back up at him. Josh is watching the edge of the trees which they’d walked over from, and Tyler’s insides tighten up anxiously. Two figures in white t-shirts and white track pants are crossing the fallen log, their boots coming down hard on the ground, confident laughter evident in the set of their shoulders if not in their voices yet. One’s got those blonde, expensive salon-dreads down to his waist, and Tyler recognises him from the class. The pair had taken one of the inner stations – they must’ve been tailing them for ages.

“You guys are done already?” Josh asks conversationally, but Tyler picks up on a quiet tension behind his voice.

“It’s Josh, right?” the guy with dreads answers, the pair slowing as they meet him.

“Yeah, what’s up,” he says. Tyler can hear him smiling, even though basically all he can see from here is the group’s heads and shoulders against a backdrop of thin grass and patchy shade. His paint-slicked fingers hover in mid-air, like the Hierophant’s in his tarot deck.

“The hell happened to your hair?” the other one says instead of introducing themselves in return, and Tyler’s stomach clenches even further, going hot, and then _cold_ as Dreads lurches closer, arm outstretched to ruffle the soft green. Josh tosses his head, ducking away. With the way his weight sways, Tyler can tell it was rough – not too rough to shake off, but definitely not friendly. He watches Josh square his shoulders back up to them and fold his arms.

“Where’s your friend?” they ask.

Josh nods up to where Tyler is, and he can hear his own breathing and the faint whisper of leaves overhead as their faces fix on him. “What’s up,” one of them says, but then they immediately shift their attention back down.

“We’ve heard things about you,” one tells Josh, and it sounds like they aren’t good things. His hand pushes through his own hair, the dreads tumbling heavily behind its path. Tyler wishes he wasn’t up this _stupid tree_ , but he’s not sure what help he’d be on the ground, either. Josh is tough, could hold them off, he thinks, hesitantly – _hopefully_ – but that train of thought immediately bursts into self-loathing as he realises that he doesn’t wish he was down at Josh’s side at all.

_Coward._

“It’s cool, Tyler, just finish the sigil,” Josh says loudly, without even looking up. Tyler hesitates but his legs are aching and his heartbeat’s pounding in his ears and making it hard to balance, so he twists awkwardly back around and dips his fingertips in paint again. His hand shakes a little as it meets the sheet, sketching as quickly as he can.

“We heard from Paul, you know Paul, right?”

“Yeah, I know Paul, sorta,” Josh answers.

“He said he was from your town, yeah,” the other says, slow like a gradual smile. “He had plenty to say. Said you were a fag. That true?”

Tyler almost twists around hard enough to fall to his fucking death. Josh’s frame sort of stiffens, but he doesn’t back down. “Uh. None of your business, but okay.”

There’s a beat of silence where Tyler feels his lungs collapse, and the two guys are both struck dumb, but it doesn’t last long.

“ _Son of a bitch_ ,” the guy _wheezes_ while the other one cracks up. “He told us it was just, like, _popular rumour._ He said _probably_ true. Like, he didn’t actually _know._ Wow. _Wow._ ”

“He’s gonna lose his _mind._ ”

“Oh, _fuck_ , I feel for you, dude – yeah, you up there, I mean you,” Dreads actually calls up, and – alongside the disbelieving laughter which still keeps bubbling up as he talks – he genuinely sounds appalled on Tyler’s behalf. “There’s no way you’re coming home from that cabin alive.”

They remind Tyler of the guys that kept the other kids in order at his old Sunday school, right down to the white clothes. His eyes are fixed on Josh, who resolutely isn’t looking back up at him. His shoulders have sagged just a little.

Tyler wishes he could see his expression.

No, he doesn’t.

“Can’t believe we gotta share dorms with a queer,” Dreads spits at Josh. The other one mimes fucking; makes ugly noises; sparks a new wave of laughter.

Tyler thinks about Josh’s sister.

He thinks about the Hierophant.

Numbness spreads from his hands as they tip the paint can upside-down, and that cold, shocked sensation travels down his arms, chilling his chest, the breath in his lungs, and the blood behind his face. It’s pure horror, but he still can’t stop, and he feels the can empty out into the space below his branch.

The paint doesn’t splat so much as streak, leaving a slash across the scene below, like marker pen across a photograph, and their clothes turn black forever. Dreads’ dreads are a definite casualty. Josh gets hit too, a bit, but Tyler’s still so shocked at his shaking hands that he can’t feel anything – not guilt, not even _fear_ when the pair stagger and lose their collective shit. They howl. They threaten him with death. They call on God to set the trees ablaze where they stand. Josh pushes squarely back with both hands when Not-Dreads – who’s suffering from an eye glued shut against the seeping black – advances hard; he sends him reeling backwards and off-balance. The palms of Josh’s hands come away blackened and sticky.

“If you’re quick, you’ll make it to the lake before it dries,” Tyler yells down, his voice too soft for this and wavering _badly_ , but to his fucking disbelief they _actually back off_. They twist and retreat, spitting curses and threats all the way to the edge of the trees.

 “You can come down,” Josh says, his voice a little hollow.

“I’m not coming down until they’re _literally_ out of sight,” Tyler answers sharply back, fixing his eyes on their black-and-white forms as they hurriedly push through the corn field. Josh doesn’t reply, instead quietly examining his own marks – a splash across one arm; his neck, his ear – until Tyler’s awkwardly drops back down to the ground from a few rungs up.

“I’m not going to-“

“Are you, um, okay?” Tyler asks, his fingers hovering at his sides, and the soles of his sneakers turning wet-black as he steps closer.

“I’m – yeah.”

“Uh,” Tyler starts. He stops. “Is it – was that really true?”

“Look, if you wanna switch partners somehow, I won’t blame you,” Josh says finally, swallowing. His eyes are crystal-hard. _Toffee_.

“What, so you end up stuck with one of _them?_ ” Tyler snorts, flinging one arm out at the field.

“You’re not gonna be any use to me if it bothers you,” he fires back, and Tyler feels small all of a sudden, like he wants to apologise – though what _for_ , he doesn’t know. “We gotta believe in each other, a hundred percent. So, does it? _Bother_ you?”

The Hierophant’s eyes bore through Tyler’s brains again.

“You don’t think it makes a difference, do you,” he realises.

“No, it has nothing to do with my faith.”

Tyler deflates. “Then no. It doesn’t matter. I guess.” He pauses. “Sorry,” he offers out, but Josh just nods and shrugs past to leave, screwing the palms of his hands up in the front of his ruined t-shirt to wipe the worst of the paint away.

With his stomach feeling horribly heavy and his limbs still weak and spindly, Tyler trudges back to the foot of the ladder, swings his backpack over one shoulder, and scans the ground for leaves that he can clean his fingers on. There’s a bright green, lush area which receives a little more sunlight than the surrounding forest floor. Crouching beside it, he scrubs his fingers off against a thick, clean tuft of grass. It’s just as he’s about to straighten up that a desperate, fluttering movement amongst the nearby leaves seizes his attention.

It’s a honeybee trapped in a spiderweb.

As Tyler walks away, he tries his hardest to unsee it.


	5. Tuesday Night

_On the second night, Tyler dreams that he is in a crowded place. A sharp pain lances through his shoulder blades. His back bends beneath the weight of it, and then his mouth starts leaking something corrosive; something thick, and acrid, with the same changing colour of ink creeping through wet paper. His fingers fly to his lips. They soften like melting wax at the touch and join the steadily quickening stream down his chin. Everyone’s starting to notice. His spine hurts; feels broken. He’s doubled over, cupped hands scrambling frantically at the wreck of his jaw, but the flow just increases. There’s so much of it that he can’t breathe. It’s ceaselessly gushing now, and in the gaps between his fingers, Tyler feels his teeth spilling over from his gums and dropping to the slick, foamy ground at his feet like a handful of tiny dice._

_Those to his left and his right are physically repulsed, contorting and flinching to put as much space between their skin and his as they can. If it were possible, he would retch from the shame. He tries to apologise, but all that comes out of the black hole where the lower half of his face used to be is a violent stream of bubbles._

_Tyler looks up to see Josh standing opposite him, at the forefront of the recoiling crowd, and pleads silently for his help. Everything is quiet save for the soft splatter of liquid at his feet. Josh silently crouches and plucks one of Tyler’s molars from the puddle; a sticky, pinkish thing, trailing wet string. He regards it between thumb and forefinger with cold, hard eyes, and Tyler’s stomach drops. Face scrunching up with disgust, Josh tosses it back into the steadily-spreading pool of tissue and turns on his heel. Just before he disappears amongst the crowd, Tyler can see him wiping his fingers off on his jeans._

He wakes with a soreness twisting his back and a tide of anxiety rising up over him, wave after wave, no matter what he thinks about. It feels dangerous even to breathe, as though the rise and fall of his chest will disturb the tension in the air and turn it against him. A tear stutters in a silent, hot line from the corner of his eye and into his hairline, where it tickles at the tip of his ear before bleeding into the pillow. He stares at the underside of the mattress above him and listens to Josh breathing deep, steady, peaceful breaths until morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i changed the name because.. i realised i wasn't sure how to pronounce it... which is ridiculous lmao


	6. Wednesday

Wednesday isn’t the halfway point of a camp that begins on a Monday and ends on a Sunday, but Tyler can’t shake what feels like the _knowledge_ that _Wednesday is halfway through the week_ , and he only sat down in his first _practical_ class twenty minutes ago. His stomach flutters with anxiety as the counsellor adds another shape to the whiteboard at the front of the class. He does it in ugly green, and the marker tip squeaks on the curves.

Tyler’s supposed to know how to fight the Devil in four days, and he knows he’s not thinking straight. He rolls his shoulders against the lingering ache in his upper back. Neither of the guys he doused in paint yesterday have even reported it. He doesn’t know if it counts as good news. He gazes blankly at the board for a beat or two before he realises that the air is thick with flicking paper and the click of uncapped pens. They’re _composing_ sigils now, writing their passion and will and fear and faith into geometry. The purpose of _this_ sigil will be to protect anyone within the circle in which it is painted. Scribbling a star into the palm of his hand to start his ballpoint pen, Tyler poises the nib to write, but it stutters to a halt a millimeter from the page.

He’s – just – he’s more interested in what _Josh_ is drawing.

He feels like Josh’s shadow after yesterday afternoon. They’d walked back from the warding point to the camp in excruciating near-silence, Tyler so desperate to establish conversation that he could scream, and yet bereft of words. He’s terrified, is the problem, and Josh isn’t stupid – Tyler _knows_ it shows. He can’t help it. His trial partner’s a queer. It’s just – it’s not that he actually has anything _against_ them, for real, he doesn’t – but it’s a complication that he doesn’t know how to shoulder right now.

Does sin so intrinsic to Josh make them both _more_ vulnerable against the Devil? _Less_ vulnerable? Maybe it really does all come down to faith – in which case, Tyler is acutely aware that he _needs to_ _relax_. The pyres visible from the dirt road in keep flashing behind his eyes.

Imagine the talk back home if he came out of the cabin speaking in tongues, while blue-hair, stretched-ears _, queer_ Josh made it back unscathed.

See, this is _exactly_ why he hasn’t said anything aloud.

All Tyler wants is to make things right.

He’s so out of his depth.

And here he sits in the sweltering classroom hut, his thoughts far too jumbled to focus on drawing, one foot jiggling back and forth anxiously under the desk, legs are neatly folded over one another. His hands grip the sides of his seat, ballpoint pen abandoned. Tyler can feel the pressure of a headache setting in like thunderclouds amassing in his skull, symptomatic of fatigue and nightmares alike.

“Five more minutes,” the counsellor announces, “and then we’re going to move on from protection sigils.”

_Okay okay okay._

Okay.

He strains to watch Josh’s desk out of the very corner of his vision until his eyeballs ache, but the notepad’s angled slightly away and Tyler can’t get a good look.

Exhaling slowly through his nose, he picks up his pen.

What makes _Josh_ feel protected? What makes him feel _safe_ , and _strong_ , and _secure?_

For some reason, the answers Josh would give to these questions feel far more important than his own. He thinks it’ll involve family. Earth, maybe. Josh is tactile; he seems to like closeness. Warmth.

Pulling himself together, Tyler blinks hard at his blank page and starts with a circle. He adds Taurean horns; a central point to signify the Sun; a spiral of outward-pointing arrows. Right when he thinks he’s done, he throws a sideways look out to Josh, and redraws it so that the central dot is a tiny circle of its own, instead. It reminds him of the silver tunnels in Josh’s earlobes. Something defiant. Something immortal. _You cannot touch me._

The counsellor likes his sigil a lot. Josh’s is more irregular in shape than Tyler would’ve guessed, but they’ve used identical arrows. Josh’s cheeks dimple as his face lights up. “Nice,” he comments, and Tyler feels that happy heat surge within him even after Josh has turned away and flipped to a clean page.

The second sigil which the counsellor wants them to create is intended to symbolise their very souls. With his confidence building and his pen between his teeth, Tyler flicks through his Book of Shadows for everything that he _is. The sign of the angels; the messenger. Neptune, his planet. Rain. Strife. Illusion._

“Can I see?”

He starts a little, but he’s just about finished, so he slides the page across. To his surprise, Josh drops his own pad squarely in front of Tyler, too. Tyler’s fingertips tentatively skim its surface as he pulls it closer.

“This is really cool,” Josh says. “When’s your birthday?”

“Um, I’m a Sagittarius,” he answers, not taking his eyes off Josh’s sigil. “I know, it doesn’t – uh, I’m not really that into it.”

He trails off before he can get into _why_ , because Josh has drawn the maiden, mother and crone symbol; two crescent moons, flanking a full one. Like, he hasn’t just _drawn_ it: he’s _centred_ it, working the rest of his symbols into its shape. It’s a breath from blasphemy.

“You’re going to get kicked out,” he hisses, but he can feel himself smiling out of the other side of the sentence. It’s a genuinely fascinating move. From the spreading sunray shapes to the spilling cup, it exudes unconditional acceptance and warmth, but then that hot streak of rebellion plastered behind it all sets the lines alight. It’s a soul overflowing.

“You don’t have to like it,” Josh teases quietly, but Tyler can’t even look away.

Even the lines are bold.

“No, it’s – it’s awesome,” he answers, the words low and soft and heavy in his mouth. When he looks up, Josh is looking back – _properly_ – for the first time all day, and Tyler just watches back.

“Seeing as most of you are finished,” the counsellor interrupts, “we’ll start to move on. Some of the most powerful rituals involve the painting of sigils onto the skin so that they can be properly activated. Again, pair with your partners. You’ll be marking _their_ skin with _their_ sigil, as clearly and expressively as you can. Materials are in the cupboard at the front of the room.”

The words filter through to Tyler’s brain while he stares. Most of the groups around them are pulling off their shirts, leaving them draped across the backs of chairs or in little pale heaps on the floorboards. Josh’s expression tightens up with concern.

“Are you okay?” he murmurs. One of his hands slides a little closer on the desk, but stutters to a halt. Tyler doesn’t think he even realises it moved.

“I’m fine,” he says. His lungs are full of light. It’s like struggling against the sting of tired eyes so that you can watch a sunrise grow brighter and brighter. “You wanna – shall I, uh, get something to paint with?”

“I’m serious, Tyler, it’s fine if you’re not cool with this,” Josh says, his eyes wide and gentle.

“It’s, like, one of the most amazing soul sigils I’ve ever seen,” he says. “What d’you want me to use to paint it?”

Josh seems to relax into his chair. “This is Neptune, right?” he asks, tracing a finger along the trident in Tyler’s sigil. Tyler nods. “Use the sea,” he says. “Something from the sea.”

‘Cupboard’ doesn’t really do it justice – it’s deep and dark, a holy arsenal capable of arming a plagued town from one solstice to the next. It’s swarmed with classmates, and Tyler strategically hangs back for a moment as he spots Dreads – or, _‘Michael’,_ apparently – digging through the shelves and then shouldering his way back through with a jar of something chalky in one hand and a glass bottle of cream in the other. Sure enough, there’s a cooler on the lowest shelf – _blood, milk, fresh leaves, soft fruits for crushing_ – but Tyler ignores it when he gets to the front of the crowd. He’s not sure what he needs, but it won’t be in there. Someone pulls out a whole tray of tiny, rattling bottles of oils, and part of the crowd peels away to pore over them. The heavy sounds of mason jars and stone pots chinking together fills the cupboard as they’re pushed aside, and tall, slim vials line the very back of the shelves as Tyler digs towards them, dragging his fingertips across their necks. Ink. Holy water. Oil. Crushed coral. _Getting warmer_. Venom. Wine. _Sea water._ He snags it and begins the search for something that he can mix with it, kneeling to the shelf below, where a little casket contains a series of containers of ash – ash from charcoal, from sacred plants, from cremations. Tyler’s eyes widen a little at the ceramic urn labelled ‘witch burning – august fifteenth – male, 17’. Small jars stacked to the side carry labels: broken shells, or black sand, or crushed coral, or _powdered sea snail venom – yes,_ Tyler thinks, and then settles on black volcanic ash from the casket for his own markings to be painted in, returning to their desks with his hands full.

When he gets there, Josh has pulled his shirt over his head and he’s absently folding it over and over in his hands, gazing into the distance through one of the hut’s dusty windows. Tyler sets the bottles down on the desk, eyeing his bare skin pointedly.

“Dude. Why didn’t you just beat those guys up?”

Josh laughs slightly self-consciously, fidgeting, touching a palm to his taut stomach. “These,” he points at the little cluster of bottles, settling his fingertip on the venom dust, “ _this_ is perfect.”

It’s a bright, rich purple, and Tyler knows that literally _hundreds_ of snails would have been required just to provide the little heap of vibrant powder that Josh tips into his ritual bowl. Drop-by-drop, the seawater turns it to paste, and then to a paint. The hue deepens even further, perhaps – and when Tyler dips two fingertips into its surface, he catches its scent: the ocean in a bowl.

“Um, you stand there,” he starts, twisting Josh’s notepad around so that he can see the sigil. “And I’ll – I think the dot in the middle, that should be – here?”

He touches the knuckle of his pointer finger to a spot a little lower than the centre of Josh’s chest, right at his sternum, and Josh just nods, so he presses the two tips of his fingers there instead, and then he doesn’t stop.

Josh’s chest is _hard_ , but not in the same way that wood, or stone, or even bones are hard. His skin’s soft and blood-hot, alive with the kind of movement you can pick up on with your fingertips but not with your eyes, and his chest _breathes_ , and Tyler feels a smile creeping up on him as he makes those first few marks.

“Are my fingers cold?” he murmurs. They’ve gotta be; it’s like Josh has a furnace beneath his skin.

“Not really,” Josh’s eyes scrunch up, a quick laugh.

Tyler first draws out a circle the size of his outstretched hand, his fingertips sweeping mulberry-coloured arcs across pale skin, and then he adds the twin crescent moons that so defiantly desecrate it. The symmetry’s important. He drags slow, slow curves with the side of his thumb, the shapes spanning down to the ridge that marks the lower edge of Josh’s ribcage. Tyler can feel the skin jump, giving little twitches when he brushes the sensitive skin. Josh actually _shivers_ when Tyler gets to the four sunrays; they’re long, wavy shapes that extend outwards, and the lower two _just_ reach the sharp, firm slope where his hipbones jut out.

“Sorry,” he breathes.

Josh just watches.

“The purpose here,” the counsellor says as he stands up from a pair on the opposite side of the room, “is not just to familiarise yourselves with the process. This is your spiritual partner for the week. Your life may rest in his hands, and his might rest in yours. Really focus on his sigil – try to appreciate and _realise_ his soul as intimately as you possibly can. _Know_ him.”

Tyler doesn’t need the reminder. The pairs around the room chatter and compare sigils, a few sharing easy laughs, but not them. When they _do_ speak it’s low and hushed - Josh gently advising, Tyler uttering little agreements. Every time he swallows, it’s heavy and thick in his ears. There are two more marks to draw, and Tyler’s fingers work the first into the firm planes of Josh’s upper chest, softly skating almost as high as the hollow that lies between his collarbones. It’s a shape formed of two symmetrical lines entwined, symbolic of both a Gemini and a soul governed, above all, by love. The final symbol is in the shape of a wine glass – the tarot suit of Cups – and when Tyler strokes his fingers just shy of Josh’s navel, the muscles spasm and Josh coughs up a restrained giggle.

“Sorry,” Tyler tells him, and then smiles and nudges with the back of his hand when the skin won’t stop seizing up. “Hold it together, dude.”

“Hold it together,” Josh echoes softly, exhaling. Eyes shut. His body tenses and quivers under Tyler’s touches as the last lines are painted, but not enough to mess them.

“Done.”

“Done?” Josh cracks an eye open.

He’s done. Tyler’s arm falls to his side; he lets out a long, shaky breath and has no idea how long he’s been holding it. Like this, with the sea painted across his chest – _his Neptune; their sea_ – it strikes Tyler as unmistakable that Josh’s soul is aligned with water: stormcloud; morning dew; glacier; the soft smothering of flames. Not a fight, but a slow, overwhelming embrace, where the only difference between a caress and a punch is pressure.

“Your turn.”

Tyler tries to get his breathing under control as he uncorks the ash jar, tapping the base to tip a heap of the black dust into a ritual bowl - his own, this time - followed by a little of the seawater. As the two are combined, he pulls his shirt over his head and drops it at his feet.

Josh’s careful strokes are a soothing, welcome pressure across the sensitive skin of Tyler’s chest, his concentration showing through a concerned little frown and the occasional chewing of his lower lip. He sketches the triangle, trident and and angel symbols as dots before connecting the lines, mapping the asymmetry, wrapping the curves to the warm, soft slopes of flesh and bone. Each moment of contact has Tyler’s heart beating harder, his body heating and drawing bowstring-taut.

“Your chest is moving-“

“I know, I’m sorry,” he exhales, all a rush of breath, and tries hard to calm down.

The mixture of black volcanic ash and seawater is a thin but slightly gritty paste, charcoal-grey, and he tries to focus on its blissfully cool path behind Josh’s fingers. For a minute, his hand comes to rest just above Tyler’s hip for support. Josh works slow and sure, handling him with this quiet confidence which is making it hard to swallow, and this reverence which is making him lightheaded.

When his touches venture further down, tracing the circle at the lowermost point of the design, Tyler’s stomach jumps concave.

“It’s okay, Tyler,” Josh murmurs, his voice velvet, so low that no one but they can hear. He draws a diagonal line through the circle. “It’s okay.”

“It’s just a lot,” Tyler whispers. If he doesn’t say it under his breath, he’s sure that his voice will break beneath it.

“I know,” he says, drawing a long, long vertical line down the centre of the entire sigil on Tyler’s chest, right where his ribs meet, and a shiver runs all the way up his spine in the opposite direction. “I know. It’s okay.”

Counsellor King slides past their desks and Tyler straightens, swallowing hard. His pulse feels like it’s visible in his chest, knocking on the other side of the painted sigil, but the counsellor’s eyes drag away instead. They fix with a distinct start on Josh’s chest.

When they file out, Josh and Tyler are at the back, collecting towels and soap from the dorms before queuing up outside the shower block to wash away their work. They’re always at the back. Josh sprawls out on his back on a sun-baked grassy verge beside the shower block while they wait, arms spread wide, marked skin bared to the sky. Tyler kneels beside him. He tugs up thin, brownish stems of grass, splitting them in two with his fingernails before tossing them back.

“You okay, dude?”

Tyler thinks about his dream.

“Yeah,” he answers.

He’s the last person to get into a shower, tugging the curtain all the way across and plastering the wet fabric to the tiles on either side of the cubicle so that it clings. He realises that his hands are shaking. He knows why. He wishes he could put the water on cold, but it’s just one of those metal buttons that you push every thirty seconds and the heat rains down in heavy torrents, stroking all the same paths as Josh’s fingers. Tyler could cry. He’s so aroused that he’s trembling – _all_ of him, so that even his legs are wobbly – and when he gives in and touches himself, it feels so fucking good that his eyes literally roll back and close. He has to bite his lip to keep quiet.

It’s not – it’s not that he’s thinking about _Josh,_ but the thing they just did was _intimate_. To touch souls, he thinks, _is_ erotic. It’s spiritual, not sexual, and it’s with these hastily-formed, pleasure-hazed semi-thoughts that he lets go, and all he can think is hot, wet skin and heartbeats and fingertips, and the way Josh sounds as he murmurs against his ear; _it’s okay, I know, it’s okay._ Tyler’s insides turn to liquid and he tilts his head back, one hand blindly reaching to keep the shower button pushed in. His body starts tensing, hips twitching, feet twisting against the wet tiled floor, and then he has to let go of the shower button because it’s not enough to bite his lip; he smothers his mouth with his palm, _hard_ , choking back a despairing, high sound as a flood of pleasure shakes him to his core.

He isn’t even totally out the other side of the orgasm before he starts to feel sick, going still and numb where he stands, leaving his hand across his mouth even though there aren’t any noises to hold back. Breathing heavily through his nose, he wipes himself clean, with weak, shaky fingers. The shower cuts out. He doesn’t move.

He thinks about his dream.

On the third night, Tyler doesn’t sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's getting gay
> 
> as always if you feel like saying hi please do! i would love to talk either here or... on tumblr .......i can't work out how to insert links lmao i'm and-so-are-you.tumblr.com


	7. Thursday

“Not at _all?_ ”

Tyler feels grey.

“Not even for, like, an hour?”

“No.”

His tone doesn't leave an inch for doubt, and Josh hovers in the corner of the canteen, helpless, as Tyler wraps his hands around polystyrene coffee and hunches over the nasty red-plastic tabletop. His hoodie sleeves have holes torn for the thumbs.

“Dude, are you okay? You’d just _disappeared_ when I woke up. I was ready to freak out.” Josh drops into an opposite seat and leans in - neck craned, elbows-on-table - so that Tyler’s hood can’t obscure his face. Tyler’s just watching the trembling surface of his watery coffee, and all the lights have gone out behind his eyes. They flick up momentarily, fixing Josh with the kind of bloodshot, hollow intensity that betrays someone who is aware that to blink would be to tempt fate. Josh stares back. “I - uh, I almost thought _they'd_ , you know. Got you back.”

“Not yet.” Tyler swallows slow, like it stings. “Just wanted to be early to prayer.”

Josh sits back, deflated. “Oh.”

“Sorry.”

“It's cool.”

Tyler drains his coffee and kicks his chair back from the table, the screech of the legs joining the clattering of cutlery and conversation. “You should probably eat,” he says.

“Are you leaving?”

“I - yeah.”

Josh looks pained.

“Ty, we should - we should really be sticking together.”

Tyler tugs his hood tighter to the back of his head by the strings, the fabric far too heavy for the rising summer sun.

“I wanna try and nap for twenty minutes.”

“Okay.”

It stings to see Josh slump slightly, but Tyler backs off and kicks a heel against the floor; the rubber sole squeaks. “I’ll see you in class,” he mutters, and turns to leave.

|-/

There’s not an awful lot to teach this week that can be covered by traditional Bible study, but the counsellors sure give it a shot, reiterating the Bible’s law of who is and isn't fit to serve as exorcists. The classroom hut isn't really big enough for them to arrange their chairs in a circle, so it doubles up here and there, kids nudging in just between one another’s elbows. Pastor Thorne reads aloud. In a quiet corner right at the back, Tyler’s head is bowed over his Bible. Josh has taken a seat as close as possible - not directly in front, but a little to the side, so that Tyler can’t see much of his face besides the curve of his jaw, maybe a hint of cheekbone, and the punched-through tunnel in one ear. The chance to simply _look_ is serving as both blessing and curse. It's helping him map out his feelings, but his stomach churns at where they settle.

The class doesn't break until lunch. That's four hours - which, without sleep, may as well be twelve. Tyler’s head begins to dip. He digs his fingers into his palms to clear the warm, gentle clouding of his thoughts; he quietly holds his breath until it hurts, and he thinks about being burned alive, and he thinks about fucking. At first, he thinks about them for the same reason, but then anxiety and exhaustion blend, and he tentatively lets those thoughts slip into fantasy. Guilty, lazy comfort blossoms through his chest, his body waking up at the imagined heat of teeth grazing his throat.

“We now turn to Romans,” Pastor Thorne declares, and the air thickens with the turning of pages.

Exhaling unsteadily, Tyler flicks to the right passage and tries to follow the tiny print. The book’s propped open in his lap, the spine snug where his thighs meet, and the pages droop slightly along with his eyelids.

“‘Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts,’” the pastor reads. “‘Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women, and were inflamed with lust for one another.’”

Tyler’s fingertips go bone-white where they’d been skimming down the too-small black print columns, pressing hard into the flimsy, overthin paper. He almost expects to leave dents, but the volume behind the page from which they’re reading is too thick. He wants to say he’d seen this coming, but he’s just _too_ \- _damn_ \- _tired_. Paper flutters as the group drag their thumbs across the page corners, scrolling almost all the way back. “ _‘Detestable’_ ,” Thorne quotes. “ _‘They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads._ ’”

Tyler curls the paper with the crook of one finger; drags the side of his thumb along its edge. He wonders which of the pages between his knees are printed with the same sins which are now indelibly marked upon his soul. He imagines littering his skin with papercuts until their gilt edges are dull and tattered.

“First book of Corinthians – ‘ _flee from sexual immorality_ _\- you are not your own; you were bought at a price. Honour God with your bodies.’”_

“How come there’s no death penalty?” Michael - _Dreads_ Michael – asks. Tyler doesn’t pay attention. Pressure’s building behind his face, and his chest feels crushed with the effort of holding it inside, keeping it quiet. Any second, it’s all going to come rushing out – he can feel the tide of it, like a torrent of water held back by only the palms of his hands – and then he remembers his dream from the other night. In an instant, like flash photography in the dark, he understands. He’s gonna start leaking; it’s gonna come out of his mouth.

“I don't understand,” he says, out loud.

“Which bit don’t you understand?” Thorne asks, entirely kindly, while heads turn and the blood howls in Tyler’s ears.

“I,” he begins, scrambling to stretch for scriptural backup - something to justify whatever sin-drenched thing is crawling up his throat. “There’s just, uh, we’re so short on people, and the warding’s bad, no exorcists, and – shouldn’t everyone be allowed the option to fight, if they believe? None of us are _pure_. It says – in Romans – _there is no one righteous, not even one_ -“

“Yes, but to be aware of one’s sin and yet _not repent_ – to sin in thought is to sin in deed,” the pastor answers, his tone grave.

The warning that it carries goes unheeded. Tyler throws a glance to Josh. For back-up, maybe. Josh must fight this fight every day of his life – his sister, too – but he hasn’t so much as _blinked_. “Okay,” he thinks, aloud, the flicker of irritation at Josh converting to courage. “Okay, but – for example, there’s this girl I know who wants to serve. She’d save lives, she’d save _souls_ , she’s devout–?”

People everywhere are staring now, bewilderment in the expressions of some, most just glad for drama. “ _I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man. She must be quiet,_ ” the pastor quotes back, enough for Tyler to know he’s on thin ice, but he’s shaking, and he bites back.

“I know women and fags more devout than straight men, and that’s just – when people are dying, it’s gotta count for something, you know?”

There’s just _silence._ Michael shifts in his seat with this look – akin to revulsion, but it’s stage-revulsion, laced with glee. Rubbernecking. Josh still hasn’t moved; he might be one of the _only_ people in the hut not twisting around to watch Tyler shrink further and further back into the hood of his too-big sweatshirt. It’s just like his fucking dream. Coughing up molars, wishing he could cram them back in the gaps.

“I just - just don't get it,” he finishes, hoping it doesn't show that frustration has brought him to the brink of tears. “Do you mind if I leave?”

Josh is looking at his feet.

“To pray?” he adds, a barely-disguised plea.

“Of course,” Pastor Thorne exhales after a pause, the rush of breath taking some of the tension from his spine with it. “Take your time. The chapel’s empty if you’d prefer some privacy. If you’d like to, I’ll make myself available and we can discuss any worries you’re having – privately, you understand?”

“Yeah,” Tyler’s fingers scramble at the zip on his bag, pushing the heavy Bible in and struggling to close it all up again. “Thankyou. I’m sorry for interrupting everything. I’m just – yeah. Sorry.”

Chair legs actually screech on the wood as people crane their necks to watch him leave. The floorboards are hollow as he crosses the circle to the door, side-stepping uncomfortably between the tight-knit curves of chairs that line the circle, fifty eyes on his back. They sting, but worse is the notion that some of those eyes belong to God – crushing, celestial-bright weight against a shame-bowed spine.

On the other side of the closed door, Tyler takes a long, shuddering in-breath, blinks once at the opposite wall, and punches himself in the stomach.

It actually hurts – at least, just enough to knock his lungs empty - and he does it again, and again, slamming the heel of his hand into the softest parts of skinny guts until he hears chairs screeching – footsteps – _someone coming –_ and he sharply makes for the exit, rubbing his sore middle with one hand – _stupid_ – and in the acid-washed morning light, he staggers down the tree-strewn slope towards a rocky outcrop overlooking the lake. Cool wind snaps across his face. He flicks his hood up and digs his thumbs into the holes torn in the sleeves, head whipping around anxiously in case he’s being followed, and it’s during this backward-thrown glance across one shoulder that he clocks Josh jogging out behind him.

“Go back,” he half-calls - loud enough to be heard, he can't be sure - but either way, Josh isn’t discouraged, so his sneakers slow, scuffing dirt and twigs as he awkwardly halts and twists to wait.

“Hey,” Josh calls out, closing the gap.

“Hey.” His lips are numb.

“ _Hey_ ,” Josh says again – softer; heavier – and comes to a standstill, exhaling heavily. He takes Tyler’s shoulders in both hands. “Are you-?”

Tyler’s tired heart breaks underneath the gentle pressure. He feels the strength drain from his muscles, limbs failing, his weight and faith in Josh’s palms. The same solid serenity that he felt yesterday, painting sigils onto skin.

“C’mon, Ty. We gotta – uh, let’s sit.”

Slightly dazed, Tyler allows himself to be led to the lake edge, where the hill and the treeline shield them from view of the camp. They sit side-by-side on the flat slab of rock; a remnant of some prehistoric cliff line.

“I’m a mess,” Tyler croaks, huddling around his own knees.

“Yeah,” Josh agrees flatly, and Tyler spits up a short, sharp, hysterical sound. “Thanks, though. That was dumb as hell, but it – I’m saying that it didn’t go unappreciated.”

Tyler takes a deliberate pause before answering. He’s got to say it. “We’re attracting too much attention,” he sighs out at the lake, slumping slightly, his weight in bony elbows resting on bony knees.

“Yeah, we are.”

The statement is a heavy one. They fall quiet and watch the water, Josh‘s hair dragging sideways in sharp, irregular shapes from the breeze rolling off the waves. Tyler’s gaze lowers to his knees, eyelashes low, and he pulls at the fraying fabric around his thumbs.

“I’m sorry I mentioned your sister,” he murmurs. The loose thread that he’s been picking at unravels a little so he lets it be, tucking it back into the thumb-hole, and balls his hands into fists in the sleeves instead. “Like, really sorry. That was – it wasn’t my place.”

Josh’s face breaks into a grin; Tyler can’t see it, but he can hear it when he speaks. “It’s cool, dude. I’m gonna tell her. She’s gonna laugh so hard. She’ll be so proud.”

Even though that tugs a smile from the corner of Tyler’s mouth, his breath catches in his throat, something sorrowful surging painfully inside. He thinks he’s solving the mystery of Josh’s self-confidence.

“Why’d you say it?” Josh asks, and Tyler doesn't know how to answer that. He looks across at how Josh is spread out – slim legs straight out front, lazy ankles crossed, weight resting in his wrists. Body wide-open and warm, like he’s soaking up the gloomy lake and the gloomy sky and everything in between. The rock face is pressing its texture into the skin of his palms.

“Can I – like, can I ask you something?” Tyler says, looking back down at his knees. “D'you think that the Devil’s going to take you, too?”

“No.”

“Even though you’re gay?”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it.”

“But – like – how are you so _confident?_ How are you so _sure?_ I mean, _everyone_ says that fags aren’t supposed to survive the trial. Sorry. _Shit_ ,” he corrects himself when Josh visibly winces, “ _queers_.”

“Uh. Better? I think?”

Tyler’s hands fret, wrapping around his knees. “I’m sorry, dude, honestly. I’m trying. I really am. I’ve never even _met_ a queer person before.”

“I guarantee you have,” Josh answers, his laugh bitter-flavoured, and not really a laugh at all.

Tyler’s head hangs. With his hood up, he’s just a curled-up, black-fabric ball.

“Hey, c’mon,” Josh pats his back, rubbing a little circle between Tyler’s shoulder blades. “I know it’s weird for you. I just, uh. Oh, no. Are you-?”

“No,” Tyler chokes, exaggerating it, comic relief.

“Oh, Ty, come here,” Josh exhales. His arms wrap all the way around. “You can cry, dude.”

“I’m so scared for Sunday.” Tyler’s weeping. “I feel so wrong. So _wrong_. I’m not like _them_ , but I’m not like _you_ , either? I’m not _good_. I’m not pure or honest. I’m just – I just _am,_ but  _what,_ I don't know. And my faith – I don’t – I’m just – how am I ever-?“

“Hey,” Josh says sharply, squeezing tight. “ _Hey,_ Tyler _._ ”

“But it’s wrong,” Tyler whispers into his hands, the words wet and shaking. Josh just hugs him, and Tyler simultaneously yearns and dreads to blindly seek more of the sunlight-warmth spreading through his thin jacket.

“You’re wonderful,” Josh murmurs, so soft, hands and voice and eyes, “and God loves you, as much as he loves me, and anyone here. And – you‘re so tired, like, and _that's_  not helping. Do you wanna sleep? You gotta sleep.”

“I can’t,” Tyler whispers, but when he’s hushed and Josh is tucking him into the crook of his neck, he isn’t sure.

The dormitory hut is silent, and the air is laced with lavender and sandalwood when Josh leads Tyler between the rows of bunks. Their own bed is at the back, the blankets crumpled.

“I’ll wake you up for dinner and you can copy my notes,” Josh says, and Tyler nods absently. Even the sight of the pillow has his head swimming. He blinks longer than he meant to. Josh’s palm is at the centre of his spine.

“’Kay,” he breathes.

“I’ll say you’re sick.”

“Ha,” he curls up, knees to his chest, eyes already shut.

Tyler’s maybe half-asleep when the bed frame rocks and creaks, startling his eyelids heavily open. He’s not sure how long they’ve been closed. Josh is kneeling by his head.

“Yo,” he says, and then he reaches out, and Tyler’s eyes widen further as he lowers a flower crown over his head. Josh strokes a couple of the edges into place with the blunt sides of his thumbs before leaning back. It’s chamomile. Tyler’s fingers come up sleepily to touch the petals; the scent reaches him and he feels it to his bones - delicate, warm, and still. Josh’s fingers curl against his own and a smooth stone slips into his palm.

“Rose quartz,” Josh murmurs. Soothing darkness rolls over Tyler as he sinks back into the covers, his lips vaguely twitching as he tries to say _thanks,_ but it dies on his tongue as a soft hum and he falls asleep before the crystal has even warmed to his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you guys are all doing okay this week <3


	8. Thursday Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long, exam season has only just spat me back out. i hope you're all doing ok! x

On the fourth night, Tyler dreams that the stars are inside of him. He cannot see but - _oh_ , he can feel. His face flutters with the stress of intense pleasure, body reflexively twisting up and shivering. There are so many sensations that his mind doesn’t know how to process; differentiate; categorise. One instant, it’s the sensation of swallowing cool water in summer. In the next, it’s the deep, under-your-skin relief of scratching bug bites. Sometimes, it’s the satisfaction of feeling your joints pop. It’s the breath after the one that you held for as long as you could. The slide of silk against sensitive skin. The rough stroke of fingers through short hair. Beneath and above all of these is a steady, surging tide of arousal, burning so hot and low in his abdomen that it’s all he can conclude – _the stars are inside of him_.

Capable of little more than enduring and savouring, Tyler’s shaking with bliss by the time he realises some of the shapes in the darkness are moving. He reaches out unsteadily; his palm meets hot, bare skin - a firm curve, a shoulder - and he understands, in that blind way that we do in dreams, that it’s Josh. When Josh’s tongue curls slick and velvet against his own, Tyler’s spine arches and he _sobs_. Josh’s lips are slow and confident, but so, _so_ gentle. As blunt fingertips skim the sides of his chest, he feels fragile as a Chinese lantern, tissue-paper skin wrapped around the framework of his ribs, and when Josh gently bites down the length of his throat, he cries out aloud and for the first time understands why people say that you can do something _with_ _abandon_.

He wakes, trembling, in sweat-damp blankets.

The room is hushed with deeper, calmer breaths than his own.

Tyler gradually releases fistfuls of bedsheets.


	9. Friday

“No.” Tyler sits reverse on his chair, both forearms folded across the top of the backrest, cheek pillowed against them. “I’ve never cast runes.”

“My mom taught me,” Josh says. “Hers were carved on cat bones. When I was ten, she took me and my sister down to the river, to paddle for our favourite stones. She helped me carve the first one.”

His grey-gloved hands splay across the pale blue cloth, flattening its corners, sliding soft against the scarred wooden desk beneath it. Josh takes the drawstring bag and pulls out a practised handful of exactly nine – the polished stones tumble, clicking, musical – and he lets them scatter with fabric-muffled sharp taps, some upside-down, some right-side-up. Around them, the classroom rings with the sound of a dozen other castings in either stones or cards. Tyler’s tarot deck sits at his elbow, its corners bent and dull, dealt out in a circle. Josh’s eyes trail curiously across the desk with his chin resting in one palm. His fingertips deftly flip over the upside-downs to note the runes on their undersides. Tyler watches him watching them.

“It’s not prophecy,” Josh says. “Which is kinda why I love them. They’re, like, a perfect demonstration that the future isn’t fixed. We’ll always have free will. What really matters isn’t the meanings, but how they make you feel, seeing them show up like that. Helps you reflect.”

“Yeah?” Tyler leans in. The symbols run deep into the slate-grey of the river stones, their etched edges worn soft from thousands of thumb-strokes. “What about the upside-downs?”

“ _Merkstave_ ; like, reversed. Bad. Usually. Kind of.”

“What’s the one in the middle?”

Josh flips it onto its back; it rocks a little against its own curved surface. “ _Sowilo?_ The sun. So. Uh. God’s wrath raining upon us,” he answers, slightly awkwardly. “Cool.”

Tyler looks gloomy. “Great.”

“But-“

“But it’s not prophecy!”

“Yeah!”

“Whew,” Tyler mimes wiping his brow, “close call.”

“Yeah, that could be, like, anything,” Josh laughs, scooping the runestones back into the bag, where they gently rattle. “You wanna go? I can read them for you.”

“Sure, yeah! You don’t mind?”

“Of course, c’mon,” Josh hands over the bag, scooting closer. He’s close, Tyler realises, and that always-present, tangible warmth spreads outwards from the edges of him like a yellow felt-tip drawing. _Sowilo_. Josh leans in to watch and speaks in calm velvet. “Just take one out at a time.”

The first one drops the wrong way up. Tyler drags a hand over his face and groans, but he’s grinning.

“It’s okay – hey, move that over here. Yeah, like that,” Josh guides him, nudging their shoulders together. “This one – it means _water,_ and it represents the future. We’ll do the past next. Water, upside down, in the future. So, like – confusion, insanity, sin. Despair. Suicide, maybe.”

Tyler looks at the little stone. It’s too small for all of those things.

“Dude,” he mutters. “Your lame-ass stones want me dead.”

“Depends if you believe in prophecy, I guess.”

Tyler stares down at the river pebble; he pictures it dancing with wet, refracted sunshine in the moments before young fingers plucked it from the water.

“After this I need to talk to you somewhere alone,” Tyler tells him.

|-/

They speak quiet and low. A little way along the glassy shoreline, a couple of guys are skimming stones from the beach – but out here, on the end of a little wooden dock, life beyond it falls almost-easily away. Josh idly flicks one of his rune stones over between his knees, _thurisaz_. It flips onto its back, its shadow quivering in the greyish afternoon sunlight.

“I mean, that would be – rare, right?” he asks Tyler.

“Like, _beyond_ rare, dude.”

“Not impossible, though. Rare things happen every day. Gotta happen somewhere.”

“I’m – honestly – probably delusional.”

“There was that coven out in Oregon last year.”

A cynical little sound bursts from Tyler’s lips. “The ones they burned. Awesome.”

Josh’s eyebrows raise a little and his jaw shifts, like he’s chewing invisible gum. He kicks his sneakers back and forth over the edge and watches them flash red across the dark, lapping waves below.

“Still kinda sick though.”

“ _Sick?_ ”

“Yeah,” Josh answers, his gaze shifting across the lake as though the waves hold answers. “I mean, if this is real – if your dreams are telling you things the night before they happen – you’re, like, _chosen_ , right? Like, special?”

“Uh.”

This really wasn’t the angle that Tyler intended to approach from. In his family, if you uncovered something _different_ , you squashed it the hell back; like a spider, wrapped up all neat in tissue, safe and sound. Josh’s expression, though, is intensely – but politely – curious. He scoots a little closer on the wind-worn wood, shifting his weight so that both of his legs are curled to one side beneath him.

“What if you’re – like – what if you’re a prophet, or something? Like, sent here for some kind of divine purpose.”

Tyler pinches his finger-and-thumb together in mid-air to accentuate his point. “I _highly_ doubt that. Besides, it’s not much guidance to go off. All it’s told me so far has been _pointless._ ”

“They were probably, like, metaphors, or something. It’s always metaphors with this stuff.”

He hopes Josh is right. He _sounds_ right. He thinks about how it felt to vomit up all the horrible things inside of him. But also, he thinks about Michael’s face twisting with revulsion. He thinks about Josh’s mouth and Josh’s fingers and the gross, damp boxers buried at the very bottom of Tyler’s bag.

“The first night here, I saw this honeybee trapped in a spiderweb,” he says, his fingers in fists in his pockets. “The next morning it came true, clear as day, like I bent down, and there was a real, actual honeybee in a spiderweb. It even looked the same. Pretty literal.”

“And you’ve never had any weird dreams come true before? No freaky-accurate tarot readings?”

“Yeah, nothing. Not before I arrived at camp.”

“Maybe its God.”

“Maybe it’s the Devil,” Tyler fires back.

“What’d you see last night?”

He remembers, his stomach twisting hotly.

“I just don’t think it’s God.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Josh says, shifting to sit against Tyler’s hip so they face the lake side-by-side. His right arm wraps tight around Tyler’s bowed shoulders and squeezes, solid. “Don’t worry. Seriously, don’t. You gotta find your peace with this, or it’ll just wear you out. Maybe they mean something, maybe they don’t – good, bad, whatever. We’ve got this.”

Tentatively, Tyler lets his head drop until it rests on the curve of Josh’s shoulder.

“I’m, uh. Really glad that we’re paired for Sunday.”

He thinks he feels Josh’s mouth open to speak, but then the deck beneath them shudders, footsteps ringing through the nailed wood. Tyler jolts upright as though shaken off. Four figures approach down the dock, two-by-two, and a fearful flash passes across Josh’s eyes when Tyler glances across again.

“Hey, don’t let us break anything up,” Michael drawls, like he’s bringing the line to a film set – practiced; punctuated with faux-lazy, sauntering footfalls. He’s playful, toes skipping all the gaps between the boards. “You sure looked cosy from here.”

“What’s up,” Tyler says; trying for _tough_ or _unfazed,_ achieving neither. He has to squint against the sun when he twists around and peers up. Michael lifts one of his feet, pressing a solid, heavy boot-print weight to the centre of Josh’s spine.

“No, I’m serious! You still wanna cuddle up? C’mon, I’ll make room.”

The sole of his boot steers Josh to lean left, pushing him until their shoulders bump. It’s like Michael’s pinning a bug. Josh steadily watches the waves beneath the dock, a slow swallow shifting in his throat. The runes between his knees shiver.

“You shouldn’t even be allowed this side of the camp warding,” someone else spits up, the atmosphere souring further.

“You want us out of the camp?” Tyler asks.

“Like, for a _start_ ,” the same boy answers.

“Why don’t you just go tell a priest,” Josh says to his knees.

The weight increases as Michael bends down to speak closer and Josh’s spine bows, a flinch shivering through bunched shoulder muscles. “We can do more than they can. We came because apparently you gotta be reminded,” he answers, his face smile-split, rolling his foot to one side. Again, Josh’s back bends a little to its will as he readjusts against the new weight. “Just because you walked away clean doesn’t mean you,” – his foot pushes – “ _can get_ ,” – and _pushes_ , “ _comfortable_.”

When he steps off, Josh lurches backwards from overcompensation. He looks like he has a bad taste in his mouth, and his lips curl before he rolls his shoulders to shake it off. The group are already stalking off.

“Okay?” he asks Josh below his breath, while the dock shudders with retreating footsteps.

Josh’s expression is still pained, but he nods firmly, tilting his head back and forth, working the tension out of his neck.

“You?”

“Uh, fine.”

Tyler thinks about the ache in his back, and the dream of spilling teeth. He sees Josh open his mouth twice without anything coming out, fingers pulling at the grey threads straying from his fingerless gloves.

“You ever been to Canada?” he eventually asks, and Tyler shakes his head. “Before mom died we used to vacation near Montreal each fall. We used to hike but mostly I remember the driving there and back – like, this epic road trip along the east coasts of the lakes, me and my sister playing in the back, trying to recognise places or signs out the window that told us how long we had to go. And we’d get lunches at truck stops or diners, and the food changed a little bit as we got closer. Like, the first Tim Horton’s we saw, we _had_ to stop, it was, like, family law. When we got _really_ close, there’d be these huge plane trees lining the streets, tall enough that you could watch them through the sunroof, and by the time we drove home, their leaves would have turned orange. And – anyway. Sometimes I think about going back to Canada. You know?”

The news has a lot to say about Canada, but Tyler doesn’t know anyone who’s ever spent much time there. “It’s certainly… different,” he ventures.

“Exactly,” he sighs.

“I’ll come visit you,” Tyler plays along, maybe not even joking. “Not in winter though. Like, no way. You’re on your own for that.”

A smile spreads across Josh’s face. He’s still picking at his gloves. Tyler watches, and decides to ask.

“Uh, how come you wear those?”

Josh’s hands ball into fists and then release again. “Uh,” he answers.

“It’s – I dunno, I was just curious. Wondering.”

“It’s alright,” Josh says, after a beat, and peels them off. At first, Tyler looks in vain for scars or something – or teeth marks, picked skin, that sort of thing – but then Josh turns them palm-up. The skin in the soft hollows of both palms is all hard and twisted pink in the centre, like tissue-paper scraps scrunched up in glue. The scar is dark enough to be fresh – a year or two, maybe, since they were burned.

“Oh,” Tyler says, a bad feeling in his mouth, and Josh’s hands curl again to slip back into their gloves.

“It’s much better now, like, it doesn’t hurt at all,” he says, making and unmaking fists, fingers curling up easily on themselves. “They stopped booking me into the therapy when they figured it had worked.”

He pulls the rune bag from his pocket and scoops up the little river stones between his knees, dropping them one-by-one to click against the rest. Tyler spots _sowilo,_ and _algiz,_ and painful lines around the edges of Josh’s eyes.

“It’s not right,” he says, and he really thinks he means it. He can’t stop watching the middles of Josh’s hands. “Oh my God, that’s horrible.”

“Yeah?”

It’s a _question._ Flicking a quick glance over one shoulder, Tyler sneaks each of his thumbs into Josh’s palms, letting them rest right over his burns. He presses gently and pretends that he can push something healing and warm down into the skin. He wants so badly to soothe; to touch.

“You’ve come through too much to let those asshole kids mess with your head now,” he says, and wraps both of Josh’s scarred hands in a quick squeeze. “We got this.”

An answering pressure spreads through his palms and, across the lake, a scattering of gulls anxiously takes wing.


	10. Friday Night

On the fifth night, Tyler dreams of wet, lake-shore sand scrunching between his toes as he watches a jet-black figure walk to him across the surface of the water. Terrible, magnificent, scorched wings arch behind it. Wherever their tips dip into the lake, they stain the water black. Each of the waves can be traced back to each of its footfalls, and Tyler is struck by the notion that this being could control the tides, should it so wish. He’s only unafraid because, in the dream, he knows it’s going to be Josh.

As he approaches, Tyler can see that Josh’s skin is literally flowing – wet and black, ink-drenched, spreading through the lake like an oil slick. His eyes are black, too, and they’re all void, no whites. Although he’s naked, he carries himself with such haunting, ominous elegance that it’s as though he’s clothed in the lake itself. Tyler’s feet automatically close the distance as Josh’s footsteps reach the water’s edge, and they crash together – Josh breaks over him like a wave over harbour walls, like the airborne caress that levelled Hiroshima, like the sun will one day swallow the Earth.

Tyler dreams that the being fucks him right there on the beach, in the shallows, its fluid form a silky gleam as it steadily, tortuously stains him. Black; from the inside out, moving in him like a tide. He gasps against the demon’s neck and tastes heavy, wet salt. There’s a sharp soreness flaring between his shoulder blades again, and it feels as though it’s that soreness which wakes him, but then he hears-

 

 

-the clattering of the door handle.

Adrenaline shocks Tyler’s eyelids open, killing whatever heat had pooled between his legs. He listens – for voices, maybe Michael – but there aren’t even footsteps.

“Josh,” he exhales into the still air, and rolls onto his stomach, watching between stinging blinks through the gaps in the bedframe. His back twinges painfully. “Are you awake?”

There’s no response, and when he climbs out of bed and balances on tiptoe, Josh’s covers are thrown back and the sheets beneath them are empty. Tyler’s eyes widen and a jolt shoots right through his chest: equal parts curiosity; anxiety; and that uniquely reckless brand of boredom which only visits during the night-time.

No one else is awake. He creeps to the nearest window, his fingers splaying like spiderlegs along the wooden sill, and peers through the dark dust to where a small group is trudging by lanternlight across the clearing. They move towards the classroom huts; the chapel. At first, Tyler’s heartbeat settles at the sight of Josh being led away by a few of the counsellors rather than Michael, but then it trips beats with worry. Why Josh? Why the chapel? Why _now_ , like, at _three in the morning?_

Chewing the corner of a fingernail, he anxiously crosses his arms along the length of the windowsill and fixes his eyes on the closed chapel door. It doesn’t open for about an hour, by which time his eyes are heavy and unfocused. The emerging figures of Josh and Pastor Thorne are murky blurs, and the lantern throws bright yellow bursts across Tyler’s vision. He flinches and slinks back into a tight ball beneath the blanket. Only a single set of footsteps enter: the pastor shuts Josh in and he approaches alone, walking unsteadily and leaning heavily on the bedpost. It’s only as he’s tugging his hoodie over his head that he hears Tyler hiss his name.

“ _Hey,_ ” he whispers back.

“ _Are you okay?_ ”

Josh hesitates and pulls his hoodie off. “ _I think so._ ”

It’s hard to make him out by the frail light of the lamps outside, but Tyler can see Josh looking down at his hands, their palms up.

“ _Oh, no,_ ” Tyler breathes.

“ _It’s okay, I’m just gonna try and sleep,_ ” Josh says in a rush, but Tyler’s already out of bed, phone in hand.

“ _You gotta bandage them,_ ” he says.

“ _Already done,_ ” he answers, holding his hands up and gingerly wiggling the fingers. The centres of his palms are dressed and taped. Tyler gets closer anyway; he envelopes Josh’s shoulders in the press of his arms and – here, like _this_ , Josh has never seemed smaller.

“ _I saw them take you._ ”

Josh rests his cheek glumly on Tyler’s shoulder and lets his weight sag a little. His arms slink around Tyler’s waist and keep him close, wrists limp, palms still searing from where they’d attached the conditioning electrodes. His fingers tremble and hover above the marks, struggling between the sting and the instinct to cover them.

_“I don’t know what my sister’s gonna do if the Devil takes me.”_

“ _You gotta sleep,_ ” Tyler whispers, his cheek tickling against the messy-mint tangle of Josh’s hair. “ _C’mon._ ”

The bedframe creaks under Josh’s shaky weight. Tyler kneels down and very, _very_ quietly drags out his prayer box by the electric-cold light of his lock screen. He remembers his mom doing this for him on bad nights. He remembers the smell of white sage on her fingertips when she’d playfully stroke the tip of his nose, and he remembers lying perfectly still for cold quartz on his forehead. He tucks a handful of lemon balm leaves and lavender flowers into a little white drawstring bag and whispers, reciting – just a quick, fluid stuttering of Latin, a spell cast – and then he kisses the bag, tosses it up to land on Josh’s chest. It lands with a soft _tap_. Tyler climbs up next, ignoring hushed protests, and pushes at Josh’s hips until he can kneel in the warm space at his side.

“ _Just for a sec,_ ” he murmurs, and leans over to tuck the bag of herbs under Josh’s pillow. _“I’m just gonna – real quick. Pretend I’m not here._ ”

A smile tugs at Josh’s lips as he lays back and closes his eyes – too deliberately, like a kid pretending.

He can feel Tyler’s fingers creeping – pushing the covers back and his shirt away – and then, Josh feels the touch of a warm, smooth stone to his sternum. His stomach tautens and he exhales; sinks into it.

Tyler draws a slow, slow, honey-coloured spiral outward from the centre of Josh’s body until the amber between his fingers is blood-warm. He doesn’t think about his dream. When he gets to the end of the first spiral, he drags a line back to the middle, and then he begins another one.

 _“I’m going to live in Canada one day,”_ Josh tells him.

Tyler can feel the words vibrating through the stone. _“Try to sleep_ ,” he whispers.

Josh doesn’t answer. By Tyler’s fourth spiral, he’s tracing arcs across a chest full of heavy, sleepy breaths, and he leaves the amber nestled in Josh’s navel before slinking away with an ache in his chest.

He decides that there’s nothing he won’t do to make sure Josh leaves the cabin alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey i have a playlist for this! just the one i put together while i was writing. idk if there's pressing demand for, like, thirty songs that sound like "gay crisis at dark bible camp", but here they are: https://open.spotify.com/user/chess_boxing/playlist/6BFFtkHJxJElpacsXE5rxD
> 
> <3


	11. Saturday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slow update on this one, I've dropped into that weird summer depression void... but now... we're hopefully surfacing <3

When Tyler wakes a couple of hours later, he experiences the singularly magical sensation of smelling the rain before he sees or hears it. It’s still semi-dark, but sleep feels miles from reach. He rolls onto one side, turning his back on the rest of the hut, and he curls gently around a folded-up heap of his blankets. One of his fingers traces the ink-shapes on his arm, all lazy flicks and curves. It’s Saturday morning, and he can officially say: _tomorrow, I meet the Devil._

_We_ meet the Devil.

The rain whispers down the veins of leaves, and Josh breathes steadily in the bunk above.

Tyler’s bent over his Book and revising sigils when the bell wakes the rest of the dorm, the gloomy morning light as pale as it’s likely to get. Birds whistle and bicker from rain-glossy branches. He watches a single, shivering droplet race down the windowpane. It’s not falling anymore, but the earth is wet and rich, and the warm air drifting through the open doorway smells like soft soil.

They file towards the cafeteria hut, weaving between shallow puddles. The dusty clearing outside isn’t so dusty this morning, and Tyler can see the beginnings of muddy footprint-paths across its centre. Josh’s head is bowed as he walks, sneakers splashing. He’s picking at the corners of the gauze pads taped across his palms, lifting the edges to inspect the burns underneath.

Tyler chews his lip as he watches. “Yo,” he says, faltering. “They okay?”

Josh thumbs the gauze back down and shrugs, tilting a hand back-and-forth in mid-air: _eh._ “I’ll get the dressing changed after breakfast,” he says. “Before class.”

_“You_ okay?”

“Yeah. It’s alright.” Tyler’s not expecting their eyes to meet, but they do, and he’s struck by the weak, tired sunshine of him, warming his face even through the drenched Ohio morning. “It was really cool of you to take care of me, Ty. I slept, like, _so_ well. Corpse-like.”

“I got you, man,” he answers back, which sounds playful, but he _really_ means it. “My mom used to do it. I had night terrors when I was a kid.”

A beat passes as they enter the cafeteria; Josh is quiet, and Tyler feels a breezeblock drop to the pit of his stomach when he remembers that Josh’s mom hasn’t been around for a long time. _He’s_ probably the one up at night, late, making chamomile flower crowns and dropping rose quartz into his sister’s palms.

“Want me to come with you medical?” he asks on the way out.

“It’s cool,” Josh answers, and their footsteps begin to arc away from one another in the damp dirt. “You better take good notes ‘til I get there, cos I’m gonna copy ‘em.”

“You got it,” Tyler calls over his shoulder.

A taut feeling creeps higher and higher in his stomach the longer the class runs with an empty desk on his left, and when Josh arrives much later, the dressings across his palms aren’t changed – they’re _gone_.

_“Sorry. Made me wait,”_ he hisses as he ducks into his seat.

_“The – why didn’t-?”_

_“Something about the crucifixion,”_ he answers.

It’s impossible to inspect the fresh electrical burns without drawing attention to them, but Tyler can’t help a long glance as he pushes his Book across the desk. Josh begins speed-copying, his unruly hair flopping over his forehead and quivering faintly as he scribbles, head bowed. Tyler can’t blink. The skin’s scaly-red; it’s gonna blister.

_“The – what?”_

Josh’s eyes flick up and back down, a dark flash beneath turquoise tangles, and he scratches out a quick message in the margin:

_theyre like marks of atonement ????? cant cover/hide_

He punctuates it with a very lopsided raincloud, ink rain-dots streaking down the margin, and then carries on writing.

|-/

“Got anything waterproof?” Tyler asks the counsellor. “Like, with spares maybe? We’re doing practice rituals out in the forest this evening; gonna be out in the rain.”

The counsellor digs up a little tube of salve and a stack of burn dressings from the cupboard beneath the medical office sink. “Careful next time,” he says, as he finishes taping white gauze across the back of Tyler’s left wrist.

“Will do. Thanks,” he grimaces, zipping his backpack and closing the door behind him as he leaves.

He slips the burn salve into his jeans pocket. It clicks against his lighter as he walks.

|-/

“I don’t know what to say,” Josh says.

He’s outright wary. They’ve stopped walking, and all they can hear is the rustling of the deserted forest on all sides. Old raindrops slide from leaf to leaf. The jiffy bag of burn supplies in Tyler’s outstretched hand is beginning to spot with drizzle.

“This ritual’s gonna be really tough,” Tyler says, slightly wearily. His wrist goes limp, but he doesn’t drop his arm. He knew Josh was always going to _hate_ this, and the last thing he wants is the argument that they’re already skirting. “Like, exhausting. You can’t – you can’t work with salt like this, you can’t use a blade like this. Not without those burns clean, and covered, and stuff. I’ve got ointment too – here.”

“I’m not–“ Josh breathes out, hard, “-that’s kinda _not my point_.”

“Just take it,” Tyler pleads. He pushes his sleeve up halfway to the elbow; there are a couple of inches of gauze wrapped around his wrist. His hand trembles a little bit. “Look. It sucks but I’m fine. We’re like – on the same page now.”

“The same _– Tyler-_ “

“I’m serious,” he says, loudly, the sound coming back at them off the dense tree trunks. They’re both face-to-face now, polarized, and Tyler can feel dread and frustration competing for attention in his mouth. “Please don’t make this an argument, Josh, we need to work together. Like, we _need to_ work together. I didn’t wanna worry about your hands. I want – I just want you to be okay. Or I can’t concentrate. It puts us on like, different levels. And I need you _with_ me, man.” He breathes, hard. “Are you with me?”

Josh visibly gives up, heart on his sleeve, his thousand-word face falling apart, and Tyler finds himself pulled into a hug. His own arms wrap around Josh’s tiny waist and lock them both together.

“Of course I’m with you,” Josh sighs. “I’m _with_ you, Ty.”

Tyler inhales into the curve between Josh’s neck and his shoulder, and the forest quietens.

|-/

Tyler sits back on his heels, a quiet satisfaction settling in the corners of his mouth at the circle that he and Josh have swept and built. It’s marked out by salt and smooth river stones amongst the scrubby dirt, each cardinal point candlelit. On the altar in the centre, it’s Josh’s bowl that they’ve half-filled with water. He’s Gemini, the Lovers, chalcedony. It’s a better fit. There’s haematite, too, and crowns of rosemary. This is their practice ritual – if they’re going to pull off the trial tomorrow night and one day protect their hometowns, they gotta learn to be one force, faith-aligned, the same way that clouds are neither air nor water. This ritual is cloud formation in the dirt.

A strange feeling comes over him, and then it pours with rain.

Energy flares in Tyler’s chest as Josh straightens opposite, because this is it, they’re starting. It’s not something that either of them needs to voice; they just meet in the middle, and the forest air thickens with burning sage. Droplets cling to the haloes of rosemary circling their heads. Tyler glances north, east, south, west – the candles dance dangerously in their lantern houses, but the circle holds. The altar that they kneel at is a tree stump, its age rings interrupted by the carved lines of a pentagram worn soft by countless winters, and, in the centre, Josh’s freshly-sharpened athame points north. There are alcohol wipes and bandaids in Tyler’s backpack.

Bloodletting isn’t practiced until the last day of camp. He’s ready to shoulder it, he thinks, chin up, eyes low. Ready to score off tally marks. Ready to leave this forest with his soul bound to Josh, scarlet-sealed – in suicide pact or baptism; time would tell.

“O water, creature of God,” Josh begins, cupping the little bowl of water, “I exorcise you through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will come to judge the living, and the dead, and the world by fire.”

It’s choreography – Josh makes the sign of the cross, Tyler flicks sea salt into the bowl. The salt crystals spit up tiny splashes and so does the hammering rain, which wraps their soaked clothes tighter to soaked skin.

“O God, who for the salvation of mankind has built thy greatest mysteries on this substance, water, in thy kindness hear our prayers and pour down the power of thy blessing,” Tyler continues, fluid from rehearsal, and Josh turns to face him. “Amen.”

They’re close, inches apart, and Josh passes Tyler the blade. All around, the rain rattles the trees. Tyler realises that he’s breathing harder than usual, like the wet shirt hugging his chest is hard on his lungs. He knows where he’s cutting. The knife is rain-wet as he drags it down the tan skin opposite his tattoo, and the beads of blood that form along the split almost immediately leak outwards like tiny, rusty clouds. The rain must be leaking inwards, too, Tyler reasons. He draws two fingertips through the bright, scarlet slit. The very sky is in his veins.

“You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day,” Tyler says, his scratchy-soft voice almost drowned by the thick hiss of rain hitting earth, and he raises his red-tipped fingers to Josh’s mouth. “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will rest.”

His nerves are alight as his fingers drag across the softness of Josh’s mouth, the smudge leaving a vertical red line down the very centre of his lower lip. It feels like the holiest moment of Tyler’s life. A warm breath ghosts across his fingertips, despair and rejoice all at once, and he has to consciously lower them again. That twisting in his spine is fucking _dangerous_ , but his soul is in his mouth and his fingers are shaking, arm stained by that yellowish, off-red colour of half-rinsed wounds.

“You will not fear the plague that strikes at noon, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,” Josh is murmuring, his own pale forearm blood-slicked now. Tyler watches the blood smudge as he speaks. “For you have invoked your shelter; you will tread on the cobra and the viper.”

Josh’s fingers come up to graze Tyler’s rain-wet mouth, fingerpainting, and Tyler can’t help it – he feels his lips curve gently, pressing the barest of kisses to Josh’s fingertips, and he tastes red iron. He can’t breathe until Josh’s suddenly-still fingers relax, resting against Tyler’s mouth in enough of an invitation for him to do it again – and he does, the way you kiss holy hands, with his eyes closed and his pulse on pause. The rain’s like white noise.

“May Christ, the living water, bless and transform you,” Josh continues, his voice faltering. Each kiss is tiny and rain-soaked and slow, and he doesn’t lower his fingers even when he brings the little bowl of water up to take their place. They skate backwards to unsteadily map out Tyler’s jaw, _shaky_ , and Josh watches him drink. Wet eyelashes, glossy lips.

Tyler swallows slow. “You, too, are clean,” he takes over, taking the bowl and tipping the water past Josh’s lips. The other boy’s eyes flutter closed and affection rushes up through Tyler – too much, like he’s gonna shatter and melt at the same time. He can’t help it. The side of his thumb plays along the high crest of Josh’s cheekbone while he drinks. Elegant brows, curved nose. A face with edges where there shouldn’t be. He wants to know all of them, and know them in the dark.

“Amen,” Josh whispers.

“Amen.”

Their fingers link between their bodies and they shiver in stillness together, breathing the same rain, until the sage leaves are cold ash and the candles leak smoke.


	12. Saturday Night

On the final night, Tyler falls asleep in fits of unrest, bracing himself for nightmares; for clues. They’re quiet when they start out. Just dreams. Tyler dreams of a flooded hall, his sneakers leaving wet, soft taps that shiver across the wide, glassy puddle. Transatlantic.

He thinks it might be his old school hall; he recognises the stage curtains at the front – these big, _ugly_ blue things, floor to ceiling. They’re on fire. He remembers this because that surreal, flaming scene runs its fingers up his brainstem, and _then_ he thinks – _oh, this must be a dream. I’m dreaming._

Tyler takes it all in again, absorbing this strange plane. The flames are quiet. It’s like his ears are filled with cotton, and pain is blossoming through his back, like ink through crisp white shirtsleeves. And also, something, somewhere is _dripping_.

Tyler’s eyes are low and orange-lit as he watches the reflections play in the wet floor. There’s a gnawing feeling that he’s missing a point.

Is this a metaphor?

Is this a warning?

What’s dripping?

He looks down and, sure enough, something warm trickles down his arm and – _drip!_ – scatters his reflection. Tyler _knows_ that it’s gonna be blood – these things always end up _some_ brand of traumatic – and dread slides down his throat, making a home in his chest as he checks for a wound.

It’s his tattoo, kind of. His tattoo is bleeding this ugly, inky blood, and it’s smeared all over, the way it was on the December afternoon that he spent under the needle’s angry buzz. He can almost smell the saran wrap surfaces; the disinfectant. Now that he’s noticed it, the familiar sting bubbles up beneath the swollen skin to match the searing heat twisting his back. It _hurts._ His mind is all white. It wipes the dream, and kicks him from the unearthly realm which claims us at night.

Tyler jolts awake to shrill morning alarms and scrunches his eyes shut, burying his head into the pillow with both hands, like he can dive back into that burning school hall. Sleep stares back and shakes her head. He curses and swings his legs out of the bed, already twitchy with adrenaline. The bed shakes as Josh climbs down.

“Sleep okay?” he asks, kneading an eye with the side of his hand. “See anything?”

“A flood, a fire,” Tyler says, his voice extra creaky from sleep. “My tattoo was fresh. Everything hurt. You know, really helpful, this _second sight_ thing.”

“Oh well. Maybe you’re gonna get a new tattoo.”

“Maybe I’m gonna get a new tattoo,” he smiles, tired, and stands upright to face the day.


	13. Sunday: Sunset

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, my last confession was twelve days ago.”

Tyler’s fingers brush each of his shoulders in the sign of the cross, and then curl up in his lap like old flowers. He watches the curtain in front of him – an old red, the fabric paling along one side from the push of hundreds of hands. It’s dark in this booth, mostly; he’s illuminated by light coming through the patterned wooden screen, painting bright criss-cross shapes across his skin. He can’t see through to the other side.

This is the part where Tyler lists his sins. His hands untwist and re-twist between his knees.

His thumb traces the bandaid on his arm, pressing into the bright-heat slit below. He can’t scrub the blood ritual from his thoughts. He’s remembering his dreams – the sex ones – and everything he’s ever overheard about sex rituals. Half of the kids Tyler’s ever known have probably jerked off to sex ritual fantasies at some point or another, but it’s just far enough from _vanilla_ for his stomach to clench in church. Tyler’s been imagining jittery candlelight, and the feeling of his fingers dragging through the sweat-slick hollow of Josh’s arched back. He can smell frankincense and a rain-soaked forest floor. He can almost hear the heavy, hot gasps against his neck as Josh spills litanies between kisses, and he’s been imagining the weight of Josh bearing down through slim, hard hips.

The base of Tyler’s spine aches whenever he thinks about it, but reality’s walls are closing in on the confessional booth, wrapped in the stink of rosewood and cold dust. Tyler feels a swallow travel every inch of its way down his throat. He wants life to pause - a chance, maybe, to know Josh in another world, or another life, or something. He wants Josh silent at his side across hours of interstate, and he wants Josh coughing up flu-germs in his ear through bitter January nights. He’s got birthday presents in mind.

“Do you think your faith will withstand the night in the cabin?”

“Yes,” Tyler answers calmly but without pausing. He thinks that’s how he’s _meant_ to answer, and he _wants_ to blend in: to play the game. _Damn any judgement but God’s._

“Are _you_ going to survive?”

“By His will, I’ll live.”

“You’ve come a long way this week, Tyler,” Pastor Thorne says, and Tyler feels it like a cloudburst in his chest.

|-/

Tyler hooks his thumbs behind the straps at his shoulders, tugging his backpack up a little further. Everything’s in there. His prayer box rattles softly, and his Book bumps with every step, a flat, heavy shape in the centre of his back. A cool breeze takes the edge off the warm evening, curling over the corners of the paper in Josh’s hands. He smooths them back with his thumbs.

“West is fine,” he says, nodding down at the printed map. “I mean, the actual hut’s more like north-west, but west is way easier for now. Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Sounds okay?”

“Sounds great,” Tyler answers, a flood of warmth for Josh spreading through his chest. Josh is anxious, he knows – he’s spent all day biting his lips and nails, head down, quieter than usual – but God, he’s _trying_ , down-playing the exercise like it’s Boy Scouts, just orienteering or something. He throws Tyler a sunshine grin – the kind that shuts his eyes – and tucks the map in between his sharp hips and the hoodie tied around them.

The earth beneath their sneakers is dust-dry and split with cracks, even after yesterday’s storms. As they walk through crop fields he can even see the plant roots criss-crossing the cracks, deep in the earth, like little spiderwebs. Tyler forces his eyes up, instead, to the green-and-gold stalks bowing beneath the hot sky, heavy with wheat, and he watches them rippling towards the horizon like waves defying the tide. The narrow paths carved across the fields force them to walk in single file. Josh’s hands bat and skim the leaves as they pass, and his bright-mint hair flutters against a halcyon sky.

The chainlink fence is symbolic of the camp’s warded boundaries rather than actually designed to keep anyone in or out. They follow it for less than a minute before finding a gap in the posts that can be easily ducked through.

“Here we go,” Tyler mutters. He knows that that’s not really how it works, but losing the camp’s protection as he passes the border feels _tangible_ , like the rush of hot air when you leave a department store in winter. Josh throws a backward glance to the fence, and Tyler knows that they’re both thinking the same thing.

“Hey,” Josh suddenly says, and he’s nodding down to the space between them, and he’s reaching out.

“Hey,” Tyler repeats, slightly lost.

Josh’s fingers wiggle.

Oh.

“I – uh,” he says, his own hand twitching. “Do you – d’you think we can? We’re not even in the-“

“Exactly,” Josh gestures with the offending hand to the barren field around them. “Just you, me, and the demons.”

“What if someone sees?”

Josh gestures, again, to the _barren field around them,_ and Tyler tosses his head, shaking his own dumb question away. His stomach flutters heavily. He can't stop smiling. He doesn't know what to do.

“No, of course we don’t have to hold hands,” Josh clarifies, smiling at his scraped-up, dusty sneakers as they walk.

“I wanna.”

“Ty, it’s cool, it’s no big deal-“

“Convince me,” he says, and he means it like he’s flirting, but it betrays him and comes out with an edge of desperation. It's very uncool.

Josh is quiet. Somewhere, birds are calling.

“I don’t wanna be the asshole who drags you out of this closet early,” he murmurs.

“You couldn’t if you tried,” Tyler answers. His eyes scan the horizon, narrow and stinging against the sunlight. “I’m in control of my own sexuality crisis. I’m owning that.”

“Yeah?” Josh counters, laughter lilting beneath the word.

“Yeah, _so_ ,” Tyler drawls, and twenty paces later, his fingers tentatively slip into Josh’s palm.

They bump and brush together between their bodies, blindly feeling out that place where their hands fit together, jigsaw, and then it _clicks_ and their fingers are laced. Tyler’s smiling so wide that it feels like his cheeks are gonna split. So’s Josh. When Tyler glances across, the other kid turns his face away, still smiling as he mutters a sulky “shut up,” and Tyler feels a squeeze warm the tight, safe anchor of his left hand.

|-/

Before the building itself emerges from the trees, Josh spots the first of the five warding posts positioned around the cabin, and drops Tyler’s hand to point it out. It’s smaller than the big camp-warding stations – it’s more like a modest totem pole, with protective symbols carved vertically, like Tyler’s seen on the candles that his mom keeps lit by the front door. He brushes his outstretched fingers across its rough-sanded, playground-log surface as they pass.

At the centre of the posts - each one representing the point of a star - squats the wooden cabin, its windows grime-hazed and its left flank shrouded in clinging weeds. Their leaves almost entirely obscure the gas cylinders for heating in winter, and part of the entrance. When Josh gently pushes the wooden door open, it lets out so cliché a creak that they both descend into giggles, tiptoeing stupidly into the musty room beyond.

It's basic. A partition screen semi-obscures a large water tank, a toilet, and a basin. The porcelain is black with mildew where it meets the floorboards and walls. That’s about it, as far as furnishings go. The roof above is steepled, rising up to a point beyond a few horizontal beams that give the illusion of a ceiling. The scent of sulphur hangs in the air. Tyler’s imagination supplies yellow fumes, their trailing fingers wrapping around the walls.

“Want me to leave the door open a while?” he says, casually as he can.

“ _Definitely_ yes.”

He wedges it open with the only other furniture in the room – a plastic red canteen chair – and ducks back inside. Josh is still assessing the room, hands on hips. He sketches out a circle with one finger, indicating the space they’ll be working in.

“We can just fit a nine-foot circle in here,” he says, “and hide in it all night.”

“Sounds good, dude.”

“Yeah? No toilet breaks? Nine hours?”

“Sounds _good, dude,_ ” Tyler repeats, firmer, and shrugs off his backpack with a thud. “Wanna build it now?”

Josh watches Tyler pull most of the bag’s contents out onto the splintered floor. His black hoodie flops out, the Book drops with a soft _flump_ to a random page, and a jar of stones clatters and rolls. Judging by the golden-hour evening light filtering through the forest, they have less than an hour before the demons rise.

“I’m gonna check the sigils on the posts,” Josh says, rubbing anxiously at his opposite arm. “And re-paint any broken ones. You can start, though.”

The roughly-hewn floorboards bite at Tyler’s knees through the pale patches in his jeans, and they sting as he straightens. There’s a rope in Josh’s bag and Tyler unfurls it to the knot at nine feet, fingers quick, and uses the length to measure out the circle in white chalk on the dry floorboards. He can see the dust from the erased circles of trials that preceded this one, tiny white smears engrained in the wood. He wonders who drew them, and which town they called home. He wonders whether they made it back there or not.

The circle’s gonna be warded to hell and back. It’s marked with sea salt and shards of obsidian and tourmaline, which Tyler’s had saved in a tiny bottle for eighteen months. There’s frankincense burning to the north, east, south, and west, and he’s set a little dish of the oil in the centre, for anointing. There’s a wreath above the main door, and the leaves are glowing in fading light.

He and Josh sit close and eat dinner – gas-station BLTs, Pepsi, and a bag of Funyuns – outside the cabin door, like they’re on a regular camping trip. It’s impossible to actually tell when the sun’s fingertips slip from the horizon, but Tyler thinks that they both feel it – perhaps as a twist in the breeze, or the birdsong – because Josh shivers, idly scuffing the dirt.

“Wanna head inside?” he says.

“I wanna head inside.”

Tyler exhales; hard, like he’s psyching himself up, and they turn their backs on the shadows leaking across the root-choked forest floor.


	14. Sunday: Midnight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKay!! I absolutely disappeared offline for a solid year while I finished uni. It was great but it really burned me out, and I pretty much just benched any hobbies until i was done. I never wanted this story to be left hanging at almost the last chapter, and anyone still following it is a hero for tolerating that entirely shitty cliffhanger! But we're back! and it's kicking off!!!
> 
> (I didn't even reply to comments which is honestly just rude of me. especially edy, smeeders, Owlsofthenight, terrifiedatbest, and MademoiselleDun - thank you SO MUCH for dropping comments my way, they really picked me up even though I wasn't in a place to reply. i'm going to sleep right now but tomorrow- i'm on it <3)
> 
> have a good week yall. enjoy this spooky nonsense xx

The charge in the air can almost be tasted, the humidity and anticipation building up a thick tension which settles around Tyler’s bare shoulders like a cloak. He watches the altar candle dancing. It’s not much to see by; Josh is huddled close, too. Tyler watches it play across his thousand-word face – the strange firelit angles, the quiet hold of narrow eyes. The dark and the stillness are unnerving. He feels like there should be a storm tonight: creaking wood, tapping windows, and the roar of rain.

When he read the Camp Wormwood leaflet that they handed out at Sunday school, Tyler remembers imagining this trial as a game of wits, almost. Developing a strategy as a team, but outlasting your partner if necessary. Closely watching for signs of possession. Emerging at all costs. Here he is, and he just wishes he had the courage to hold Josh’s hand. After sunset, they performed the bloodletting ritual together, foreheads almost touching, breathing the same air, painting each other’s chests. Tyler knows that they would have kissed under literally any other circumstances.

He closes his hand over his own wrist instead, around the slowly healing burn from yesterday. Everything stings – new cuts, his spine, and the adrenaline. There’s nothing to take his mind off it. The circle is cast, with nothing left to do but pray and wait.

“Tyler, there’s – I see lights.”

It immediately feels _bad,_ like not realising that you’ve bitten into rotten fruit until it’s falling apart in your mouth. Tyler sees them too – a faint, orange glow which _barely_ makes it through the dusty window – and he thinks about the school hall in his dream, and he thinks he _knows_. He feels faintly ill as he stands up, making the sign of the cross against his chest and leaving the safety of the chalk-and-salt circle. He doesn’t lapse into spasms on the floor, which is a relief, so he steels himself and cracks the front door to check outside.

“Fire,” he breathes, skin prickling against the night air.

“Where?”

“In the trees. Dead ahead. Not _too_ close-”

“I think it was a warding post,” Josh suddenly says, and Tyler’s guts lurch.

“Stay here,” he says, but Josh is already pushing past with a backpack slung over one shoulder, not even picking up his shirt. Tyler curses as he follows at a sprint, chasing Josh’s silhouette toward orange smoke.

The damp wood snaps and spits up sparks like the fourth of July, reluctant to catch from branch to branch. Tyler sends a brief thanks skywards; the rain was always on their side. When they arrive, the fire’s smaller than it looked from the cabin – but the warding is blackened beyond repair, its sigils aflame and leaking off into the air as ash. Josh stops dead in his tracks and drops his backpack to the floor, eyes fixed on the destroyed post like it’s all he owns.

“ _They_ did this. They must be here.”

“I – I know,” Tyler breathes heavily, already stamping flames out, kicking dirt, smothering anything smaller than his shoe. He _didn’t_ know that, but he does now, zero doubt, and he wants to spit away the realisation like mouthwash. “Come on. Quick, let’s make sure it can’t spread, and then we can get back to-“

“-the cabin,” Josh finishes for him, visibly paling, and Tyler meets his stare with the _worst_ feeling in his stomach, like the forest floor has just dropped away. They turn in unison to look back the way they’d run, where the empty cabin isn’t even lit brightly enough to see through the trees.

“Shit, _run,_ ” Tyler grits out, and they turn tail on the failing fire, running headlong through a tree-trunk maze, thin branches snagging arms, shins, wrists. His heart sinks when there’s no struggling candlelight illuminating the doorway, and there’s a gushing, gurgling sound coming from inside, like someone in the next room is running a bath.

Josh disappears into the open mouth of the cabin first.

Tyler’s half expecting an ambush. It’s just an empty, dark room, but when he hastily flicks his phone screen on, the cold light catches glossy, wet floorboards. The altar and the shitty plastic chair – the only furniture – are overturned. The noise is coming from the wall – he looks up, and there’s a deep, unearthly split in the side of the cabin’s water tank, as well as a wrecked pipe pouring a steady column of water from the wall. Their circle - well, the circle is gone. Tyler can feel the scattered crystals crunching beneath his shoes, the salt forming a sad trail of wet mush around the room. He nudges a toppled candle with his toe. Ripples roll out around it.

“Check your bag, we need - anything,” he says. He hauls his soggy backpack up from the floor; water drains from it like he’s wringing out a dishcloth.

“My bag’s outside,” Josh says, slightly desperately.

“It’s okay, man, take this,” Tyler says, holding the rope in his outstretched hand. He’s shaking. “We’ll start the circle again outside. We’ll-“

Over the doorway, the rosemary and ivy wreath bursts into flames.

It’s impossible to look away. The flooding water flashes yellow as it spreads lazily across the cabin’s floor, and Tyler feels the staccato panic in his head, and he’s biting the inside of his cheek until it goes metallic.

“Don’t look at it,” he hears Josh urge, and Tyler tears his eyes free, blinking at the wall. “Come on – outside, let’s go-“

They both flinch at a guttural hiss as the flames rear their heads, roaring toward the ceiling like blowtorches above the doorway, and then a vast presence sweeps into the cabin like a blast wave.

Tyler’s wondered what the divine looks like before. Everyone has, he thinks, in one way or another. Tonight, he learns that there’s no white light; he was expecting a white light, but it’s still dark, save for the fires. Instead, his head splits with bright pain and he recoils like a man in an oil painting. The great, dawning weight of the divine drapes itself around the chambers of his lungs. It feels like the universe bending down to whisper in his ear: _“This is it.”_

He takes a breath to recite the exorcism, but chokes on an early word. It scorches to inhale – like powdered glass in his throat – and Josh is the same.  Tyler’s knees are soaked and he’s kneeling, eyes watering, and he can hear Josh retching beside him, and-

**Those words can’t hurt me, Tyler. Not that it matters, but I’m not your Devil.**

The words make Tyler’s ears pop, like he’s on an airplane.

 **You have something I need,** he hears, and the invisible fist around his throat tightens. The blazing wreath above the door has spread to the wall; it’s all going up in flames.

“I don’t know you,” he chokes out, stormclouds drawing in across his vision. “Not my God.”

**I may not have made you, but I’ll unmake you.**

The red plastic chair in the corner lurches to the center of the room as though flicked by the fingers of gods, its legs shrieking against the wet wooden floor.

At the same time, the abandoned rope whips violently upwards from its sodden coil on the floor - Tyler yells out in warning, but Josh has already caught it as it collides with his chest. He does it with startling, uncanny ease. His eyes are out of focus, too, and his lips are parted. All of the panic has evaporated from his expression.

“Josh-?“

He’s drawing the rope through his hands, making loops while Tyler stares.

“ _Josh,_ ” Tyler says again, harder – but the other boy is dead to the world, staring vacantly through the opposite wall, and he’s still making loops. “ _Hey,”_ Tyler shouts into the darkness, voice cracking, face pale, _“what’s happening to him?_ ”

**I know about your dreams, Tyler.**

“My-?”

**The ones that come true, the things spilling from your mouth, the horror, the sex, the ache in your bones, the demon in your gut, the trapped honeybee, the bloody teeth, broken spine,**

Pain drags around the insides of his skull like blunt fingertips. Josh is holding a noose, and he’s climbing up onto the red chair.

“ _Stop,”_ Tyler begs, “ _stop, please, please just stop-_ “

**holes for eyes, hair on fire,**

“I can – please, I can give you what you need, just – stop-“

**Anything? A blank cheque, for this one’s life?**

A hard, acidic feeling lances through him, all doubt and fear, and he pauses. Josh is tying the spare end of rope over one of the ceiling beams, and he’s settled the noose over his head, around his shoulders. Tyler panics a little.

“What is it? What can I give you?”

**You can see the future in your sleep.**

“I – don’t know _anything_ about the damn future. Please – the dreams – they don’t make sense, it’s all-“

**Second sight is a rare gift, and I want you to surrender it to me.**

“W-why do you want it?”

**Surrender it**

Josh is knotting the rope tight; he has to stand on tiptoes when he’s done, his sneakers skittering and dripping across the red plastic seat. All he has to do is kick the chair away. His eyes are still dead, and there’s a thin line of blood trickling from one of his ears. Tyler’s head rings with pressure. His face stings with the heat of the cabin air; the front wall is a solid fire.

**Last chance**

“Take it, it’s yours,” he spits out, thin and shaky. “As long as you let him go. Both of us.”

The entire fire dies – just _dies_ , just like that, plunging the cabin into darkness. Josh’s eyes blink once and he sucks in a sharp breath – all of his soul pours in behind it, like switching on a TV.

“What the fuck,” he rasps, touching the noose sitting around his neck.

Tyler opens his mouth, but then it _feels_ like the room itself _grins_ around them, and an unbroken sheet of flame explodes out from the front wall of the cabin. Something punches the chair out from beneath Josh’s feet – clattering – and his body bounces, jerking desperately. Tyler’s world collapses around him and he dives for his bag, going for his knife. He’s got to cut him down.

 **NO ONE WHO SEES ME GETS TO GO HOME,** he hears, like a train colliding with the room. The air roars, searing, and Tyler yells aloud as his backpack bursts into flames in his hands. He throws it away into the puddle; it flops over onto its side, still blazing, steam billowing up angrily from the water, where the flames refuse to wither. His Book is in there – his herbs, his knife, his clothes _,_ his _toothbrush_.

Tyler stares, forlorn. It’s not the Devil. He can’t _imagine_ what it is he’s up against. Tears spring to his eyes, the smoke tugging at his lungs. There’s no lesson to recall; no exorcism to recite. He’s hugging Josh’s legs, pushing him _up_ , taking some of the weight – it’s all he can think to do – but he can still hear terrible, muted choking sounds, and there are cinders raining from the ceiling. This is it: his dream, the wet floor, the fire. Distantly, he registers that his foot is –

Tyler’s foot is literally on fire.

He kicks at the floor, splashing water desperately, but – God, he never even _felt_ it – and it’s _still painless,_ melting the edges of his shoes like butter. Part of his sock has burnt away, revealing unmarked skin. He stops kicking and stares down at it.

He blinks.

 _This fire can’t burn me,_ he realises with a fresh surge of adrenaline.

_And this thing  - it can’t get me like it can get Josh._

Tyler thinks back to his dream again and a thought hits him like a semi-truck, punching out his breath, so clear and confident that he lets Josh drop – the rope creaks – and he’s on his knees, tearing open his bag, letting the flames wash over the backs of his hands like dirty water as he digs for the knife. It should destroy the skin of his palms but he grips it tight, hand trembling, jaw clenched.

It’s surreal. There’s no time to grab the chair. Tyler braces one of those dangling feet against his shoulder and just sinks the tip of the knife right into the back of Josh’s leg.

_When Tyler’s twelve, he dreams of a great green lion prowling through a field, each of its paws the size of cars. Strings of sunlight drool from its sticky jaws and soak the grass. Tyler kneels beside a bright puddle of it, wets his hands, and smears them up against the blue of the sky. His fingertips sweep and smudge, and when he wakes up, the column of symbols that he drew are painted onto the backs of his eyelids in technicolour, as though he really had been staring down sunlight. Flinging a hand out to the bedside table, Tyler flicks on the lamp and scrambles for a pen. On the nearest surface available – the back of his forearm, with his elbow stuck out and his wrist at his neck – he copies the shapes from memory, tongue between his teeth._

Josh’s leg thrashes at the first cut, but Tyler grips tight and drags a straight line; a curved one; a straight one. He wants to be sick – he can hear heaving, shuddering screams stuck in Josh’s throat –but Tyler knows these symbols by heart, and he grinds his teeth to block everything out. The markings steadily take shape, red lines on red lines.

Beneath a great and terrible creaking, yellow spark-showers splash from part of the cabin roof as it struggles, the structure threatening to give way.

**THEY’LL NEVER FIND YOUR ASHES YOU LITTLE FUCKING HERO**

Lungs burning, Tyler finishes carving the copy of his tattoo as the sounds of splitting wood build upon each other. He smears the blood away from each shape with shaky fingers. For a heartbeat, nothing changes, but then he hears Josh take a deep, retching gasp and an immense weight collides with Tyler’s shoulders – partly Josh, mostly the collapsing roof.

The gas tank outside explodes and a white heat like he’s never known flattens him to the floor again. His chest is bare; his shirt’s in burning tatters, falling from his shoulders. The air is hot and red, like heavy summer sunshine against his closed eyelids, but it doesn’t _hurt_ him. Nothing is _hurting_ him, not even the crushing weight of the debris, which has split the cabin floor in places. Josh is cross-legged and billowing flame like an album cover. Across his palms, the gauze dressings over his electrical burns are going up in painless flames – curling up, turning black, and flaking away like old paint. He’s watching it go, his chest still heaving in new breaths.

**IF I CAN’T BURN YOU, YOUR PARENTS WILL**

Climbing to his knees beneath the blanket of flame, Tyler notices a familiar, sharp ache intensify in his spine, but he blanks it and crawls away from the cabin floor. It’s hard to move, but he can make it. Fuck, he thinks with disbelief, he _can_ make it. Josh is clambering out too, wreathed in fire, shoving aside red-glowing planks with his palms like they’re nothing.

When they meet in the middle, Tyler collapses against him with both arms outstretched. Josh’s pulse pounds and his chest heaves, all soft, firm skin and muscle, and unmistakably _alive_.

“Josh,” he says.

Tyler knows that he’s crying, but the tears on his cheeks are leaking upwards as steam. As though possessed itself, the blaze intensifies; its red, open mouth roars to the treetops with fury unfathomable. Tyler closes his eyes into the soft curve of Josh’s neck.

“I’m okay,” Josh tells him, squeezing.

“My back really hurts,” he murmurs back. He can see the blood vessels that meander across the backs of his eyes.

That’s all he remembers.


End file.
